A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.
Hello, I’m Nathanael Johnson, and today is Day 45 of the Biden administration. This week, legislators unveiled a bill that aims to fulfill some of Biden’s biggest campaign promises.
On Tuesday, House Democrats introduced their opening bid for major legislation on climate change. The Climate Leadership and Environmental Action for our Nation’s Future Act, or CLEAN Future Act, would require electricity suppliers to run on 100-percent clean energy by 2035, appropriate 40 percent of federal dollars from the bill to benefit communities that have suffered from environmental injustice, and direct states to entirely eliminate carbon emissions by 2050. It’s ambitious, far-reaching, and there’s no way it will pass in its current form.
Realistically, the bill has three possible futures:
It could pass in the House and then transform into something entirely different in the Senate to appeal to Senate Republicans.
The bill’s sponsors could tweak it to pass through the Senate via budget reconciliation.
It could die quietly and merely end up as a way for future historians to see what the Democratic climate wishlist was in 2021.
We can leave number 3 to the historians. Path 1 would require such radical changes that the bill would be unrecognizable from its current form. A dozen Senate Republicans might vote to jumpstart American competitiveness in a future green economy, but they are not going to cross the aisle to vote for big government mandates.
That leaves option 2. Budget reconciliation is the way Democrats could pass a Senate bill with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes required to avoid the dreaded filibuster. Congress created this workaround in 1974 to prevent gridlock from thwarting urgent, budget-related bills, so that the government isn’t always running out of money. Each year, Congress can effectively use reconciliation to pass one tax-and-spend bill and, if need be, raise the debt limit.
The COVID stimulus bill has already claimed the 2021 reconciliation chit. So with two left, the Democrats will have to make a Sophie’s choice between their priorities. Will they tackle voting rights? Health care? Police reform? Or will they tie the fortunes of the Biden administration to climate action?
But Wait … There’s More.
The Biden Administration is trying to save codes that would make new buildings energy efficient. Buildings suck up 40 percent of all the energy produced in the country, and a 2019 update of the codes would increase efficiency 14 percent, thanks to votes from government officials. But on Thursday, the International Code Council acceded to an industry demand to exclude government officials from voting on the code changes. Biden’s Department of Energy issued a letter saying it won’t take this lying down.
The kids’ climate lawsuit will not find a friend in Biden. The young plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States say they have a constitutional right to a stable climate, and they are suing the government to force it to guarantee that right. This week the Justice Department made its first defensive move against the case under the Biden Administration, showing that it will continue the fight of the previous two administrations against the lawsuit.
How much damage does every ton of released carbon do? Enough that it costs the country $51, according to an interim government assessment. It’s likely to change, as researchers refine their models, but for now, $51 is the number the government will start using immediately in cost benefit analysis to decide if it makes sense to widen a highway, crack down on methane leaks, or build new transmission lines.
Twelve years ago, the American Petroleum Institute ran an ad in the print version of the Washington Post. “If you like $4 gasoline,” it read, “you’ll love the House Climate Bill.”
This was during President Barack Obama’s first term, when a gallon of gas cost barely $2.70, and API — a coalition of over 600 companies and the oil and gas industry’s top lobby group — was fighting against the Waxman-Markey Act, landmark legislation to put a price on carbon emissions across the country. The bill wouldn’t just hit Americans filling up at the pump, the group claimed, it would destroy millions of good-paying jobs and ruin the burgeoning fracking industry. API even helped fund splashy TV ads pushing back against the legislation. In one, a group of Americans slowly faded from view as their jobs disappeared. (Subtle.)
Now, however, the big oil group might be about to change its tune. The group is discussing a draft statement in support of putting a price on carbon emissions — the very same policy that they helped defeat 12 years ago. Such a price, in the form of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade bill, would increase the cost of fossil fuels and theoretically help to cut carbon pollution across the entire economy. And API isn’t the only business and fossil fuel group coming around on“market-based” climate action. Last September, the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group of 200 CEOs including the leaders of Chevron and ConocoPhillips, announced its support for a carbon price; in January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long one of the most powerful lobbying groups, did the same.
But are these claims evidence of a real change of heart — or just an attempt to sidestep even more costly regulations from the new, Democratically-controlled Congress?
“Our efforts are focused on supporting a new U.S. contribution to the global Paris agreement,” said Megan Bloomgren, API’s senior vice president of communications.
One way to think about the API’s shift is that the group is simply reacting to a changing of the guard in Washington, D.C. After four years in which former President Donald Trump backpedaled or eradicated many environmental protections, President Joe Biden made climate change a central issue of his campaign and a priority in his first months in office: Just hours after his swearing-in ceremony, he put the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement. And companies are beginning to take notice. In the weeks since, a flurry of automakers have pledged to shift production toward electric vehicles, and other corporations are ramping up plans to zero out their carbon emissions over the coming decades. Against this backdrop, API’s members may be realizing that the days of spewing carbon dioxide freely into the atmosphere are over — and hope to maintain some influence over any legislation.
“It may well be that the API is realizing that carbon pricing is an idea whose time has come,” said Anne Kelly, the vice president of government relations at the sustainability nonprofit Ceres. “They know that regulations are coming, and so I think they want to be a part of those negotiations to shape what a carbon pricing system would look like.”
But the move could also be an attempt to hamstring other, less palatable policies from gaining too much traction, like more stringent regulations. Democrats in the House and Senate have largely turned away from carbon taxes and cap-and-trade in favor of things like a clean electricity standard — a mandate that the country’s electricity be produced by clean sources by 2035 — or other rules and regulations that would be overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. On Tuesday, Democrats unveiled their first big climate proposal this Congress, which included such a standard, but no carbon tax.
The group’s draft statement seemed to confirm this. “API supports economy-wide carbon pricing as the primary government climate policy instrument to reduce CO2 emissions while helping keep energy affordable, instead of mandates or prescriptive regulatory action,” the statement read, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said that a carbon price seems less threatening to oil and gas companies than other regulations — the European Union and Canada already have prices on carbon that the fossil fuel industry has learned to live with. “It may be easier for them to kind of get their heads around a price,” he said.
And, of course, the devil is in the details. Fossil fuel companies and their lobbying groups have a long history of supporting climate legislation in theory, only to back out of it in practice. Early on in Obama’s term, the CEOs of ExxonMobil and BP (both members of API) were outspoken in their support of pricing carbon. But by mid-2009, once the Waxman-Markey Act was introduced and debated, API had turned its lobbying efforts against the bill — and few of its member companies protested, according to reports. More recently, BP, which once rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum,” promised to help Governor Jay Inslee pass a carbon tax in Washington State in 2018 — then dropped its support at the last minute.
“It doesn’t cost them anything to improve their images in the short term,” Rabe said. “But they aren’t pledging or committing to a specific policy right now — they’re supporting a broad concept.”
If a carbon price does reach the Congressional floor, API and other fossil fuel lobby groups will be working hard to make sure that it’s as favorable as possible to their interests. In practice, that will mean a lower price (some oil companies, like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, already support a $40 per ton carbon tax that rises slowly over time) and potentially carve-outs, like immunity from lawsuits over extreme weather. “There is no such thing anywhere in the world as a pure carbon tax, where there aren’t carve-outs or exceptions for particular industries,” Rabe said.
For now, the group is wrestling with a changed political landscape and reported infighting within its own membership. Total, the French oil supermajor, left the group in January, criticizing API for supporting politicians who reject the Paris climate agreement and citing “differing positions” on carbon pricing. Without a change in API’s public messaging, other companies — also trying to burnish their climate bonafides — might follow.
A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.
Hello, I’m Shannon Osaka, and today is Day 38 of the Biden administration. This week, the president started to nail down his Paris plans — and faced Republican backlash.
When it comes to international agreements on climate change, the United States has a reputation for flip-flopping. Way back in 1998, President Bill Clinton signed on to the Kyoto Protocol — in which dozens of countries agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions — but the Senate failed to ratify the treaty. President Barack Obama had the U.S. officially join the Paris Agreement in 2016 — only to have Donald Trump officially yank the country out of the deal four years later. At this point, other nations are starting to get whiplash.
Now, Joe Biden is trying to make the U.S. seem more reliable. The president, who rejoined the Paris Agreement a little over a month ago, has promised to host an international summit on climate change on April 22, in celebration of Earth Day. And earlier this week, Biden met (virtually) with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to talk climate, trade, and COVID-19. Both leaders promised to release new national commitments to cut carbon emissions, and Trudeau even threw some shade on Biden’s predecessor, quipping: “It’s nice when the Americans are not pulling out all the references to ‘climate change.’”
Unfortunately, not all U.S. legislators are as happy about America’s return to the global climate conversation as the Canadian PM. Two Republican senators introduced separate pieces of legislation this week to 1) declare the Paris Agreement a treaty, and thus subject to Senate approval, and 2) cut off U.S. funding to help developing countries install clean energy. These bills are incredibly unlikely to pass, and wouldn’t be able to do much anyway — the Paris climate accord was designed as an “executive agreement,” not a treaty, which is why Trump was able to exit it unilaterally.
Ultimately, U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement is good for two intertwined reasons: cutting the country’s own emissions (which currently make up 15 percent of all CO2 spewed into the planet’s atmosphere) and pressuring other countries to do the same. If the U.S. doesn’t set a good example — climate hawks are hoping for a 45 to 50 percent emissions cut by 2030 — Biden and his special climate change envoy, John Kerry, will have a much harder time pressuring China, India, and Russia to lower their carbon pollution outputs. And without at least some support from Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats, the Biden administration will be hard-pressed to cut emissions as steeply as the rest of the world wants.
Biden intends to go big on climate, but it’s clear that a vocal opposition in Congress is hoping to slow his ambitions. Balancing the conflict at home with expectations abroad is a hurdle the president will need to clear in order to restore — and even entrench — U.S. leadership on the global stage.
But Wait … There’s More.
It’s Pixar’s world, and we’re all just living in it. The United States Postal Service has revealed the design for its new fleet of mail trucks — and yes, they’re adorable and look like they came straight out of WALL-E. But the trucks, which should hit the road in 2023, are a bit of a disappointment to electric vehicle enthusiasts. Biden had previously promised to replace the entire government fleet with electric cars, but some of the new trucks will run on gasoline. The USPS still claims all of the trucks will switch to electric-only power over time.
Check out those rare-earth minerals. The president signed an order on Wednesday asking the executive branch to take stock of the nation’s supply of key minerals, batteries, and semiconductors used to build electric cars. That’s to help the U.S. prepare to ramp up development of those parts and limit reliance on foreign suppliers like China. Conservation groups welcomed the order, but warned that increased mining would have to be accompanied by additional protections for land and water.
The first Native-American Cabinet secretary? Deb Haaland, current representative from New Mexico and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, is on a glide path to confirmation as Secretary of the Interior, after West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced Wednesday that he would vote to confirm her. Haaland faced tough questions about her views on oil and gas leasing during her confirmation hearing, with some senators labeling her a “radical.
A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.
Hello, I’m Shannon Osaka, and today is Day 38 of the Biden administration. This week, the president started to nail down his Paris plans — and faced Republican backlash.
When it comes to international agreements on climate change, the United States has a reputation for flip-flopping. Way back in 1998, President Bill Clinton signed on to the Kyoto Protocol — in which dozens of countries agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions — but the Senate failed to ratify the treaty. President Barack Obama had the U.S. officially join the Paris Agreement in 2016 — only to have Donald Trump officially yank the country out of the deal four years later. At this point, other nations are starting to get whiplash.
Now, Joe Biden is trying to make the U.S. seem more reliable. The president, who rejoined the Paris Agreement a little over a month ago, has promised to host an international summit on climate change on April 22, in celebration of Earth Day. And earlier this week, Biden met (virtually) with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to talk climate, trade, and COVID-19. Both leaders promised to release new national commitments to cut carbon emissions, and Trudeau even threw some shade on Biden’s predecessor, quipping: “It’s nice when the Americans are not pulling out all the references to ‘climate change.’”
Unfortunately, not all U.S. legislators are as happy about America’s return to the global climate conversation as the Canadian PM. Two Republican senators introduced separate pieces of legislation this week to 1) declare the Paris Agreement a treaty, and thus subject to Senate approval, and 2) cut off U.S. funding to help developing countries install clean energy. These bills are incredibly unlikely to pass, and wouldn’t be able to do much anyway — the Paris climate accord was designed as an “executive agreement,” not a treaty, which is why Trump was able to exit it unilaterally.
Ultimately, U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement is good for two intertwined reasons: cutting the country’s own emissions (which currently make up 15 percent of all CO2 spewed into the planet’s atmosphere) and pressuring other countries to do the same. If the U.S. doesn’t set a good example — climate hawks are hoping for a 45 to 50 percent emissions cut by 2030 — Biden and his special climate change envoy, John Kerry, will have a much harder time pressuring China, India, and Russia to lower their carbon pollution outputs. And without at least some support from Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats, the Biden administration will be hard-pressed to cut emissions as steeply as the rest of the world wants.
Biden intends to go big on climate, but it’s clear that a vocal opposition in Congress is hoping to slow his ambitions. Balancing the conflict at home with expectations abroad is a hurdle the president will need to clear in order to restore — and even entrench — U.S. leadership on the global stage.
But Wait … There’s More.
It’s Pixar’s world, and we’re all just living in it. The United States Postal Service has revealed the design for its new fleet of mail trucks — and yes, they’re adorable and look like they came straight out of WALL-E. But the trucks, which should hit the road in 2023, are a bit of a disappointment to electric vehicle enthusiasts. Biden had previously promised to replace the entire government fleet with electric cars, but some of the new trucks will run on gasoline. The USPS still claims all of the trucks will switch to electric-only power over time.
Check out those rare-earth minerals. The president signed an order on Wednesday asking the executive branch to take stock of the nation’s supply of key minerals, batteries, and semiconductors used to build electric cars. That’s to help the U.S. prepare to ramp up development of those parts and limit reliance on foreign suppliers like China. Conservation groups welcomed the order, but warned that increased mining would have to be accompanied by additional protections for land and water.
The first Native-American Cabinet secretary? Deb Haaland, current representative from New Mexico and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, is on a glide path to confirmation as Secretary of the Interior, after West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced Wednesday that he would vote to confirm her. Haaland faced tough questions about her views on oil and gas leasing during her confirmation hearing, with some senators labeling her a “radical.
When a severe winter storm tore through Texas last Monday, Kirby Lynch lost water and power in her RV home in Collin County. The snow came up to her ankles — higher than she’d ever seen in her life. Nonetheless, Lynch’s first instinct was to get to work. Lynch is one of two organizers behind North Texas Rural Resilience, a mutual aid collective that services rural areas outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In the wake of the storm, Lynch and Sakiewicz delivered groceries and supplies and found hotel rooms for people without housing, despite bad roads and store closures. North Texas Rural Resilience is one of a plethora of mutual aid organizations that sprang into action in the wake of the storm across Texas. Similar organizations, including Austin Mutual Aid, DFW Mutual Aid (in the Dallas-Fort Worth area), and Mutual Aid Houston, have been organizing on the ground and through social media to redistribute funds to people in need, house people from homeless encampments in hotels, and organize supply drives and deliveries of food and water to communities impacted by power outages, freezing temperatures, and water and food shortages.
Extreme weather (including, potentially, extreme cold) will only accelerate as climate change progresses, and groups facing structural inequality — including low-income communities, communities of color, and people with precarious housing situations — feel the burden of these extreme events hardest. With “solidarity, not charity” as their guiding principle, these mutual aid groups aimed to lighten that burden and fill the gap in services left by the government in the days immediately following the storm.
Lynch got into mutual aid after a friend launched Feed the People Dallas, another mutual aid group that launched in April 2020. After working in Dallas for a while, she realised that there was a need for mutual aid in her own community, which struggles with food insecurity, and launched North Texas Rural Resilience with Lucy Sakiewicz, another Collin County resident, in September. She started posting notices on Craigslist, getting referrals from friends who were social workers, and finding people who needed assistance through Instagram. Over time, she built up a list of people who regularly needed groceries and other supplies. Lynch and Sakiewicz started organizing weekly grocery deliveries to people who needed food, as well as other services like book drives and rides to the polls for the election. Regular monthly donors covered about a third of their costs, and Lynch and Sakiewicz footed the rest of the bill themselves.
In the wake of the storm, Lynch and Sakiewicz said they saw more first-time donors than ever before. They weren’t the only ones seeing a record influx of donations. Austin Mutual Aid spent $300,000 housing people in the wake of the pandemic, an amount they were able to crowdfund in part because infographics listing their Instagram account went viral on social media. (Disclosure: This reporter donated $25 to Austin Mutual Aid last week.) Tammy Chang of Mutual Aid Houston said donations skyrocketed in the wake of the storm; Chang decided to create a GoFundMe campaign to collect donations after exceeding the Venmo payment limit. By the next morning, the campaign had amassed $130,000 — “more money than I’d ever seen in my entire life,” they said. As of Thursday, the GoFundMe campaign has collected more than $294,000.
Mutual Aid Houston hasn’t always been this large of an organization. Chang started the group as a senior in college in March 2020 as a Twitter account designed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, it didn’t gain much traction — they mainly used it as a place to share resources and amplify individual requests for funds. But during the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the group started to grow — as people were arrested at protests, Chang and the other organizers behind Mutual Aid Houston started to use the page to organize support for protestors who had been arrested. Soon, Mutual Aid Houston had amassed a large enough following to start collecting donations for direct aid days — daylong crowdfunding campaigns to give money to anyone living in the Houston area who needed it for groceries, medical bills, and rent. The only requirement was that the requester live in the Houston area, said Chang — “we aren’t means-testing,” or asking recipients to prove eligibility.
With such a massive influx of money, Chang and the other organizers at Mutual Aid Houston decided that the best thing to do in the wake of the storm would be to meet immediate need by giving out direct cash payments of $100 to people on their request list. “We figured that this $100 could go to anyone who needs food, water, anything really urgent,” said Chang. As of Wednesday, $197,000 of the money raised on GoFundMe had been given to 1,970 Houstonians in just 72 hours. In addition to the direct cash aid, Mutual Aid Houston is also organizing supply distribution sites, collecting canned goods, water, personal protective equipment, and sanitary and baby supplies for people in need.
Not asking for proof of income or hardship is a core tenant of mutual aid, according to Chang and Sakiewicz. Chang says they find that many people who receive aid from Mutual Aid Houston end up passing it forward — either by applying to volunteer with the group or donating to future campaigns. To Chang, this reflects the ethos of solidarity within the community: “Take what you need, give what you can.” On top of that, organizers from Mutual Aid Houston and North Texas Rural Resilience alike are already members of the community — and for Sakiewicz, that is a big part of why their work is well positioned to respond to a crisis like a winter storm. “We spend all our time and resources directly with the people,” said Sakiewicz. “It’s the people next door, the people in our neighborhoods, so we’re fully positioned to be ready when a crisis happens. Who better to mobilize the community than people who are already in the community?”
Austin Graham, a 21-year-old volunteer with Austin Mutual Aid, spent the hours and days following the storm driving to homeless encampments around the city, trying to rescue people exposed to the elements. Austin Mutual Aid covered the cost of their hotel stays, and in the days following the freeze Graham says they ferried more than 130 people from encampments to hotel rooms, amid freezing conditions and treacherous roads. Without the hotel stays, Graham says they fear many of the homeless people they served would have been left to die in the cold, given the lack of intervention from the city.
Chang said they haven’t seen much outreach from the county, city, or state government either, other than the opening of warming centers and a few water distribution sites. For Chang, the work of Mutual Aid Houston is about filling the gap left behind by the state. “We can’t rely on our representatives to send help,” they said. “We have to take care of each other.”
For Sakiewicz, the work is personal. “As a single mom who’s struggled financially, and I’m also a person in recovery from opiates,” she said, tearing up slightly, “if I can help love someone and get them to a place where they can help themselves and feel safe enough to do better and be who they want to be, then I have done my job in this world.”
After a winter storm tore through Houston last week, the neighborhood of Manchester, like many others across the state, was left in the dark. For days after the storm, the community had no power, and nothing to light up the streets at night — save for a faint glow coming from the nearby Valero oil refinery. Through the night, the refinery’s flare towers lit up the neighborhood like enormous, flickering candles — and emitted thousands of pounds of pollutants.
Throughout Texas, as the storm approached and in its aftermath, refineries scrambled to burn excess natural gas in order to prevent damage to equipment. The winter storm in Texas was responsible for the emission of 3.5 million pounds of excess pollutants, across 200 industrial facilities, including oil refineries and petrochemical plants, due to the impacts of freezing conditions. Pollutants emitted included benzene, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide, according to data provided by the polluting facilities to the Texas Commission on Environment Quality. Between Sunday and Monday of last week, the Valero refinery in Manchester coughing and throat irritation, asthma attacks, and higher risk of heart disease or exacerbated heart disease. “These emissions can dwarf the usual emissions of the refineries by orders of magnitude,” Jane Williams, chair of the Sierra Club’s National Clean Air Team, told Reuters.
As Texans across the state navigated the overlapping crises of power outages, water and food shortages, and the ongoing threat of the pandemic, communities adjacent to petrochemical facilities faced the additional burden of the surge of pollutants. When the ice and snow subsided last Monday morning, Nalleli Hidalgo, a community organizer from T.e.j.a.s, an environmental justice advocacy group based in Houston, biked through the city to assess the situation. As soon as she got close to Manchester, an overpowering smell hit her — the air filled with an odor like nail polish remover, immediately giving her a headache.
Pollution and the pandemic alike have disproportionate impacts on Black and Hispanic communities in Texas and nationwide — and the storm exacerbated the same inequities. The pollutants released due to the storm have acute and long-term impacts on the health of nearby communities. These impacts fall disproportionately on Black, Latino, and low-income households, due to the legacy of racist industrial siting policies; like many other frontline communities, Manchester has a predominantly low-income and non-white population. Manchester faces a soup of polluting practices that have deadly health consequences for people living in the community — the cancer risk in the community is 22 percent higher than the overall Houston area. What’s more, in a disaster, communities like Manchester “are the first affected and the last to receive aid,” said Ana Parras, executive co-director of T.e.j.a.s.
Though on average winters are getting warmer in Texas and everywhere else, there is a potential climate change link between warming Arctic temperatures and extreme cold like the subfreezing temperatures that affected Texas last week — but it’s still disputed by scientists. Either way, the risks of power outages and pollution will only increase as climate change accelerates extreme weather events. “This is untenable, especially for communities of color and working-class neighborhoods,” said Bakeyah Nelson, executive director of Air Alliance Houston, in a press release. “These communities are unable to fully recover before the next man-made disaster due to a long history of environmental racism that has put them at greater risk of suffering the adverse impacts from disasters and with fewer resources to rebuild their lives.”
Moving forward, Hidalgo says that the solution to preventing future disasters is to invest in “renewable energies and green infrastructures that are weatherized.” A federal report following a similar storm in 2011 that led to power outages recommended that oil and gas infrastructure be winterized to prevent outages during extreme cold, but warnings were repeatedlyignored by Texas politicians and regulators. And as climate change increases the risk of extreme weather events, improving the resilience of Texas’ energy grid, which is isolated from the rest of the country in order to avoid federal regulation, becomes even more essential. In the meantime, communities like Manchester will continue to bear the costs.
In late January, General Motors announced a pledge to only sell electric vehicles by 2035 and make roughly 30 different models of automobile without a traditional combustion engine. A week later, Ford revealed it was pouring more than $20 billion into its EV program and that it would only offer electric cars in Europe by 2030. By 2025, Jaguar will become an all-electric luxury line of cars. Meanwhile, Tesla, the world’s biggest EV maker, is building a massive factory near Austin, Texas, where it will build not just sedans and trucks but also, potentially, the batteries.
As automakers ramp up EV production, U.S. car buyers are increasingly making the switch themselves. With more than a dozen new electric cars and SUVs set to hit U.S. showrooms this year, sales are poised to reach record levels in 2021, industry analysts say.
That’s driving state agencies, electric utilities, and startups to install thousands more EV charging stations in public places so that drivers can get around without running out of juice. Chargers are popping up in office building garages, retail outlet parking lots, highway corridors, and apartment complexes.
The challenge is figuring out how to make these accessible to everyone.
In California, for instance, low-income communities on average have the fewest total chargers per capita, while high-income communities have the most, a recent state assessment found. In some cases, the chargers in low-income areas are primarily used not by residents but commuters, who might top off their Teslas on their way to another part of town.
This imbalance largely reflects the current market: Private charging companies build stations where electric cars are likely to circulate, not in places with limited EV adoption. So as the EV industry enters a likely boom phase, efforts are accelerating to ensure that all drivers can join the transition to zero-carbon transportation. Advocacy groups and government agencies nationwide are working to close gaps in existing EV programs, which have broadly struggled to reach both people in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
“A lot of subsidies and market incentives have catered to the ‘early adopters,’ the people who can afford this technology,” said Leslie Aguayo of the Greenlining Institute, a racial and economic justice group in Oakland, California. “We want the focus to be on the on frontline, hard-to-reach communities that are most impacted by poverty and pollution, not the folks that already have income and are getting Teslas.”
Aguayo manages Greenlining’s environmental equity program, which mainly works in California to shape and study electric transportation policies. Along with curbing carbon dioxide emissions, EVs have other more immediate benefits, she said. Battery-powered cars are generally cheaper to operate than internal combustion engines, due to lower fueling and maintenance costs. And electric vehicles don’t emit any of the toxic tailpipe pollutants that disproportionately affect poorer people and people of color.
Yet two big roadblocks keep many drivers from ditching their gas-burning vehicles: the lack of home garages and shared spaces to charge batteries, and the cost of buying a new car, electric or otherwise.
California has more than 650,000 battery-powered cars on its roads today, and millions more are expected to join them in coming years. The state is currently working to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035 — creating an urgent need to expand charging infrastructure across the state.
Last fall, the California Energy Commission, or CEC, said it would spend $384 million over three years to begin filling the equity gaps regarding the locations of battery charging stations, along with building refueling stations for cars that run on hydrogen gas. About half that investment is focused on building EV chargers within low-income communities — particularly at or near multifamily dwellings.
The funding is meant to serve areas that the private sector won’t, including rural regions, said Patty Monahan, CEC’s lead commissioner for transportation in Sacramento. Some individual EV charging stations may never pencil out financially for their operators, but they’re still needed in order to connect more people to the larger network. “Ultimately, we want it to be easier to refuel an electric vehicle than to refuel a conventional vehicle,” Monahan said.
California isn’t alone in its effort. In New York, a $750 million program is underway to create more than 50,000 charging stations statewide, with about a quarter of that funding set aside for low-income communities. Ohio’s largest utility, AEP, is providing $10 million in incentives to offset some of the cost of installing EV chargers at apartment buildings, workplaces, and local government buildings; about 10 percent of stations will be in limited-income areas. Colorado regulators recently approved Xcel Energy’s $110 million plan for transportation electrification, which includes adding 20,000 charging stations by 2023. The utility will also offer enhanced rebates for low-income customers and “higher-emission” communities that want to install EV charging equipment or purchase vehicles.
Nationwide, the number of public charging stations still falls “significantly short” of what’s needed to meet the projected demand for 15 million light-duty EVs in 2030, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory said in a recent report. But the infrastructure build-out is actually surpassing current charging demand, and nearly 100,000 public and workplace EV chargers are available, according to the latest count by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fueling Station Locator.
Abby Brown, who leads the station locator, said the database doesn’t currently specify if charging stations are installed in low-income census tracts. But researchers are exploring whether to add such capabilities. The locator can be used to help planners “determine where charging infrastructure isn’t available, but might be needed to serve the public and underserved communities,” Brown said.
Locating charging stations in lower-income and rural areas only solves the fueling issue. In Seattle, Elizabeth Escobar is working to help democratize EV adoption.
Escobar is the chief business officer at Express Credit Union, a nonprofit financial cooperative. In August 2019, her team launched an EV loan program in partnership with the national advocacy group Plug In America. Express’s “fair financing” loans offer lower interest rates for electric models purchases versus those for standard autos loans. People with lower credit scores can borrow money for EVs without making big down payments. And, importantly, the loan programs applies to both new and used models.
“We really feel that owning an EV will benefit our members financially,” Escobar said. She noted that used electric cars in the area go for around $10,000 — nearly one-fourth of the price of a new electric sedan.
So far, the credit union has issued nine EV loans. However, none have gone to people from lower-income backgrounds, and Escobar said the program has struggled to draw interest in general. She speculates that might be because people aren’t aware of the potential cost savings, can’t navigate English-language materials, or assume that only wealthy people can own EVs. The COVID-19 outbreak thwarted last year’s plans to host test-driving events, but her team has hosted webinars in English and Spanish to promote the loans.
Escobar said she’s undeterred. With President Joe Biden promising to increase federal EV incentives, and with new models hitting the road, more credit union members might soon decide to participate. “We’ll be here ready,” she said.
Aguayo of the Greenlining Institute stressed that electric car ownership is only one piece of building a cleaner, more equitable transportation system.
For some communities, public investments in pedestrian-friendly sidewalks or bike lanes might serve a more immediate need than battery charging stations, she said. Other areas could benefit more from well-run fleets of battery-powered buses, or from car-sharing models that allow many people to use the same electric car. Electrifying freight trucks and other medium- to heavy-duty vehicles will have the greatest impact on eliminating toxic tailpipe pollution, even if gas-guzzling passenger cars continue to circulate.
“It’s not just about replacing internal combustion engines with EVs,” Aguayo said. “It’s about, ‘How do you holistically create a transportation system that works for the community?’”
In late January, General Motors announced a pledge to only sell electric vehicles by 2035 and make roughly 30 different models of automobile without a traditional combustion engine. A week later, Ford revealed it was pouring more than $20 billion into its EV program and that it would only offer electric cars in Europe by 2030. By 2025, Jaguar will become an all-electric luxury line of cars. Meanwhile, Tesla, the world’s biggest EV maker, is building a massive factory near Austin, Texas, where it will build not just sedans and trucks but also, potentially, the batteries.
As automakers ramp up EV production, U.S. car buyers are increasingly making the switch themselves. With more than a dozen new electric cars and SUVs set to hit U.S. showrooms this year, sales are poised to reach record levels in 2021, industry analysts say.
That’s driving state agencies, electric utilities, and startups to install thousands more EV charging stations in public places so that drivers can get around without running out of juice. Chargers are popping up in office building garages, retail outlet parking lots, highway corridors, and apartment complexes.
The challenge is figuring out how to make these accessible to everyone.
In California, for instance, low-income communities on average have the fewest total chargers per capita, while high-income communities have the most, a recent state assessment found. In some cases, the chargers in low-income areas are primarily used not by residents but commuters, who might top off their Teslas on their way to another part of town.
This imbalance largely reflects the current market: Private charging companies build stations where electric cars are likely to circulate, not in places with limited EV adoption. So as the EV industry enters a likely boom phase, efforts are accelerating to ensure that all drivers can join the transition to zero-carbon transportation. Advocacy groups and government agencies nationwide are working to close gaps in existing EV programs, which have broadly struggled to reach both people in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
“A lot of subsidies and market incentives have catered to the ‘early adopters,’ the people who can afford this technology,” said Leslie Aguayo of the Greenlining Institute, a racial and economic justice group in Oakland, California. “We want the focus to be on the on frontline, hard-to-reach communities that are most impacted by poverty and pollution, not the folks that already have income and are getting Teslas.”
Aguayo manages Greenlining’s environmental equity program, which mainly works in California to shape and study electric transportation policies. Along with curbing carbon dioxide emissions, EVs have other more immediate benefits, she said. Battery-powered cars are generally cheaper to operate than internal combustion engines, due to lower fueling and maintenance costs. And electric vehicles don’t emit any of the toxic tailpipe pollutants that disproportionately affect poorer people and people of color.
Yet two big roadblocks keep many drivers from ditching their gas-burning vehicles: the lack of home garages and shared spaces to charge batteries, and the cost of buying a new car, electric or otherwise.
California has more than 650,000 battery-powered cars on its roads today, and millions more are expected to join them in coming years. The state is currently working to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035 — creating an urgent need to expand charging infrastructure across the state.
Last fall, the California Energy Commission, or CEC, said it would spend $384 million over three years to begin filling the equity gaps regarding the locations of battery charging stations, along with building refueling stations for cars that run on hydrogen gas. About half that investment is focused on building EV chargers within low-income communities — particularly at or near multifamily dwellings.
The funding is meant to serve areas that the private sector won’t, including rural regions, said Patty Monahan, CEC’s lead commissioner for transportation in Sacramento. Some individual EV charging stations may never pencil out financially for their operators, but they’re still needed in order to connect more people to the larger network. “Ultimately, we want it to be easier to refuel an electric vehicle than to refuel a conventional vehicle,” Monahan said.
California isn’t alone in its effort. In New York, a $750 million program is underway to create more than 50,000 charging stations statewide, with about a quarter of that funding set aside for low-income communities. Ohio’s largest utility, AEP, is providing $10 million in incentives to offset some of the cost of installing EV chargers at apartment buildings, workplaces, and local government buildings; about 10 percent of stations will be in limited-income areas. Colorado regulators recently approved Xcel Energy’s $110 million plan for transportation electrification, which includes adding 20,000 charging stations by 2023. The utility will also offer enhanced rebates for low-income customers and “higher-emission” communities that want to install EV charging equipment or purchase vehicles.
Nationwide, the number of public charging stations still falls “significantly short” of what’s needed to meet the projected demand for 15 million light-duty EVs in 2030, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory said in a recent report. But the infrastructure build-out is actually surpassing current charging demand, and nearly 100,000 public and workplace EV chargers are available, according to the latest count by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fueling Station Locator.
Abby Brown, who leads the station locator, said the database doesn’t currently specify if charging stations are installed in low-income census tracts. But researchers are exploring whether to add such capabilities. The locator can be used to help planners “determine where charging infrastructure isn’t available, but might be needed to serve the public and underserved communities,” Brown said.
Locating charging stations in lower-income and rural areas only solves the fueling issue. In Seattle, Elizabeth Escobar is working to help democratize EV adoption.
Escobar is the chief business officer at Express Credit Union, a nonprofit financial cooperative. In August 2019, her team launched an EV loan program in partnership with the national advocacy group Plug In America. Express’s “fair financing” loans offer lower interest rates for electric models purchases versus those for standard autos loans. People with lower credit scores can borrow money for EVs without making big down payments. And, importantly, the loan programs applies to both new and used models.
“We really feel that owning an EV will benefit our members financially,” Escobar said. She noted that used electric cars in the area go for around $10,000 — nearly one-fourth of the price of a new electric sedan.
So far, the credit union has issued nine EV loans. However, none have gone to people from lower-income backgrounds, and Escobar said the program has struggled to draw interest in general. She speculates that might be because people aren’t aware of the potential cost savings, can’t navigate English-language materials, or assume that only wealthy people can own EVs. The COVID-19 outbreak thwarted last year’s plans to host test-driving events, but her team has hosted webinars in English and Spanish to promote the loans.
Escobar said she’s undeterred. With President Joe Biden promising to increase federal EV incentives, and with new models hitting the road, more credit union members might soon decide to participate. “We’ll be here ready,” she said.
Aguayo of the Greenlining Institute stressed that electric car ownership is only one piece of building a cleaner, more equitable transportation system.
For some communities, public investments in pedestrian-friendly sidewalks or bike lanes might serve a more immediate need than battery charging stations, she said. Other areas could benefit more from well-run fleets of battery-powered buses, or from car-sharing models that allow many people to use the same electric car. Electrifying freight trucks and other medium- to heavy-duty vehicles will have the greatest impact on eliminating toxic tailpipe pollution, even if gas-guzzling passenger cars continue to circulate.
“It’s not just about replacing internal combustion engines with EVs,” Aguayo said. “It’s about, ‘How do you holistically create a transportation system that works for the community?’”
A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.
Hello, I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today is Day 31 of the Biden administration. This week, President Biden rebooted America’s climate innovation effort.
Former President Trump sought to undo many aspects of his predecessor’s legacy on climate change, but his administration really had it out for the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E. The group — authorized under George W. Bush in 2007 but funded for the first time under Obama — supports nascent clean energy technologies that haven’t attracted major investment. Trump tried to eliminate funding for the program a number of times, despite its having wide bipartisan support.
Late last week, President Biden put in motion his plan to authorize a similar effort for addressing climate change, called ARPA-C. Instead of funding energy innovations, ARPA-C would support new and potentially groundbreaking climate technologies — everything from capturing, removing, and storing carbon emissions to developing sustainable fuels for airplanes and ships.
The idea is not without controversy. Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer and associate professor at Princeton University, told E&E News he didn’t see why a new agency needed to be created when the work could fall under ARPA-E’s remit. And a raft of environmentalists argue that ARPA-C’s focus on carbon capture and removal technologies, which could extend our reliance on fossil fuel-fired power plants and are hotly debated, could obscure what the administration’s real goal should be: preventing emissions from happening in the first place.
But others say creating such a group is an important milestone in Biden’s efforts to achieve economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050. Think of it this way: ARPA-E is mostly about climate mitigation — funding technologies that result in fewer emissions. ARPA-C could end up being more focused on adaptation. Like it or not, we’ve got a ton of warming already baked into the planet’s future, so how can we become more resilient in the decades ahead?
Biden will need congressional authorization before ARPA-C becomes a reality, but the president got the ball rolling last week by announcing the formation of a climate innovation working group “to advance his commitment to launching an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate.”
But Wait … There’s More.
This one number could alter how the U.S. handles climate change. The White House is expected to release new values for the social costs of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide on Friday. These are complicated calculations that attempt to quantify the true consequences of putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — and they can help agencies justify climate-friendly regulations. The new values will be temporary while Biden’s team works to develop permanent ones over the next year, but they are expected to be 50 times higher than the values used under Trump.
Honk your horns for climate-friendly transit grants. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced $889 million in grants for projects that, at least in part, explicitly address climate change and environmental justice. Projects will be evaluated based on whether they support strategies for lowering greenhouse gas emissions like installing electric vehicle charging infrastructure or reducing car use.
A new respect for boundaries. The Interior Department has begun reaching out to Native American tribes, local lawmakers, and other stakeholders to review changes made to national monuments, such as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, under the Trump administration. On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order giving Interior 60 days to issue a report with recommendations regarding monument boundaries and protections.
Millions of Texans have gone days without power or heat in subfreezing temperatures brought on by snow and ice storms. Limited regulations on companies that generate power and a history of isolating Texas from federal oversight help explain the crisis, energy and policy experts told The Texas Tribune.
While Texas Republicans were quick to pounce on renewable energy and to blame frozen wind turbines, the natural gas, nuclear and coal plants that provide most of the state’s energy also struggled to operate during the storm. Officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the energy grid operator for most of the state, said that the state’s power system was simply no match for the deep freeze.
“Nuclear units, gas units, wind turbines, even solar, in different ways — the very cold weather and snow has impacted every type of generator,” said Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT.
Energy and policy experts said Texas’ decision not to require equipment upgrades to better withstand extreme winter temperatures, and choice to operate mostly isolated from other grids in the U.S. left power system unprepared for the winter crisis.
Policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market.
“Clearly we need to change our regulatory focus to protect the people, not profits,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, a now-retired former director of Public Citizen, an Austin-based consumer advocacy group who advocated for changes after in 2011 when Texas faced a similar energy crisis.
“Instead of taking any regulatory action, we ended up getting guidelines that were unenforceable and largely ignored in [power companies’] rush for profits,” he said.
It is possible to “winterize” natural gas power plants, natural gas production, wind turbines and other energy infrastructure, experts said, through practices like insulating pipelines. These upgrades help prevent major interruptions in other states with regularly cold weather.
Lessons from 2011
In 2011, Texas faced a very similar storm that froze natural gas wells and affected coal plants and wind turbines, leading to power outages across the state. A decade later, Texas power generators have still not made all the investments necessary to prevent plants from tripping offline during extreme cold, experts said.
Woodfin, of ERCOT, acknowledged that there’s no requirement to prepare power infrastructure for such extremely low temperatures. “Those are not mandatory, it’s a voluntary guideline to decide to do those things,” he said. “There are financial incentives to stay online, but there is no regulation at this point.”
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which has some authority to regulate power generators in the U.S., is currently developing mandatory standards for “winterizing” energy infrastructure, a spokesperson said.
Texas politicians and regulators were warned after the 2011 storm that more “winterizing” of power infrastructure was necessary, a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation shows. The large number of units that tripped offline or couldn’t start during that storm “demonstrates that the generators did not adequately anticipate the full impact of the extended cold weather and high winds,” regulators wrote at the time. More thorough preparation for cold weather could have prevented the outages, the report said.
“This should have been addressed in 2011 by the Legislature after that market meltdown, but there was no substantial follow up,” by state politicians or regulators, said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow and economics professor at the University of Houston. “They skipped on down the road with business as usual.”
ERCOT officials said that some generators implemented new winter practices after the freeze a decade ago, and new voluntary “best practices” were adopted. Woodfin said that during subsequent storms, such as in 2018, it appeared that those efforts worked. But he said this storm was even more extreme than regulators anticipated based on models developed after the 2011 storm. He acknowledged that any changes made were “not sufficient to keep these generators online,” during this storm.
After temperatures plummeted and snow covered large parts of the state Sunday night, ERCOT warned increased demand might lead to short-term, rolling blackouts. Instead, huge portions of the largest cities in Texas went dark and have remained without heat or power for days. On Tuesday, nearly 60 percent of Houston households and businesses were without power. Of the total installed capacity to the electric grid, about 40 percent went offline during the storm, Woodfin said.
Climate wake-up call
Climate scientists in Texas agree with ERCOT leaders that this week’s storm was unprecedented in some ways. They also say it’s evidence that Texas is not prepared to handle an increasing number of more volatile and more extreme weather events.
“We cannot rely on our past to guide our future,” said Dev Niyogi, a geosciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin who previously served as the state climatologist for Indiana. He noted that previous barometers are becoming less useful as states see more intense weather covering larger areas for prolonged periods of time. He said climate scientists want infrastructure design to consider a “much larger spectrum of possibilities” rather than treating these storms as a rarity, or a so-called “100-year event.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist at Texas Tech University, highlighted a 2018 study that showed how a warming Arctic is creating more severe polar vortex events. “It’s a wake up call to say, ‘What if these are getting more frequent?’” Hayhoe said. “Moving forward, that gives us even more reason to be more prepared in the future.”
Hayhoe and Niyogi acknowledged there’s uncertainty about the connection between climate change and cold air outbreaks from the Arctic. However, they emphasize there is higher certainty that other extreme weather events such as drought, flooding and heat waves are due to a warming climate.
Other Texas officials looked beyond ERCOT. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins argued that the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry — a remit that includes natural gas wells and pipelines — prioritized commercial customers over residents by not requiring equipment to be better equipped for cold weather. The Railroad Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Other states require you to have cold weather packages on your generation equipment and require you to use, either through depth or through materials, gas piping that is less likely to freeze,” Jenkins said.
Texas’ electricity market is also deregulated, meaning that no one company owns all the power plants, transmission lines and distribution networks. Instead, several different companies generate and transmit power, which they sell on the wholesale market to yet more players. Those power companies in turn are the ones that sell to homes and businesses. Policy experts disagree on whether a different structure would have helped Texas navigate these outages. “I don’t think deregulation itself is necessarily the thing to blame here,” said Josh Rhodes, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute.
History of isolation
Texas’ grid is also mostly isolated from other areas of the country, a set up designed to avoid federal regulation. It has some connectivity to Mexico and to the Eastern U.S. grid, but those ties have limits on what they can transmit. The Eastern U.S. is also facing the same winter storm that is creating a surge in power demand. That means that Texas has been unable to get much help from other areas.
“If you’re going to say you can handle it by yourself, step up and do it,” said Hirs, the University of Houston energy fellow, of the state’s pursuit of an independent grid with a deregulated market. “That’s the incredible failure.”
Rhodes, of the University of Texas at Austin, said Texas policy makers should consider more connections to the rest of the country. That, he acknowledged, could come at a higher financial cost — and so will any improvements to the grid to prevent future disasters. There’s an open question as to whether Texas leadership will be willing to fund, or politically support, any of these options.
“We need to have a conversation about if we believe that we’re going to have more weather events like this,” Rhodes said. “On some level, it comes down to if you want a more resilient grid, we can build it, it will just cost more money. What are you willing to pay? We’re going to have to confront that.”
In the midst of a freezing cold winter storm that left millions of Texans without power or heat, Republican Governor Greg Abbott appeared on Fox News on Tuesday to bash the Green New Deal. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott told host Sean Hannity. “Our wind and our solar got shut down — and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid.”
Fact-checkers descended upon Abbott’s claims almost immediately, pointing out that wind and solar played only a small part in the statewide catastrophe. According to a representative from the state’s power grid operator, only a fraction of the total outages were caused by icy wind turbines; the primary culprits appear to have been frozen natural gas plants and a shoddily designed grid disconnected from the rest of the country.
But the governor’s false claims sounded eerily familiar, and not just because they echoed the bizarre Republican opposition to the Green New Deal over the past few years (remember Trump’s “tiny windows”?). In this rapidly warming and heavily polarized country, Abbott’s interview was yet another sign of how every storm, fire, or heat wave has become a political sparring match — with everyone pointing the finger at someone else.
The problem is that people tend to interpret disasters, and most other things in life, in a way that validates their preconceived opinions. Last year, for example, when much of the West was on fire and the skies over San Francisco had turned bright orange, former President Trump blasted California’s forest management, telling the state government, “You gotta clean your floors” and blaming the state’s rolling blackouts on too much wind and solar. Governor Gavin Newsom countered the following month, warning: “This is a climate damn emergency.”
Those arguments aren’t equally valid — climate change has dramatically worsened the likelihood of wildfire in the West, and most of California’s forested area is actually federal land. But they do point to a larger trend. Republicans blame environmentalists, Democrats call out fossil fuel emissions: This is an old story, and one that will probably continue for years to come.
At this point, though, the United States (not to mention the rest of the world) should be long past bickering over trees or frozen wind turbines. Winter ice storms and scorching wildfires can no longer even remotely be considered “natural disasters.” The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, and U.S. infrastructure — think highways, electrical grids, water pipes, and much more — is woefully unprepared.
And while hurricanes, storms, and fires have always been fodder for political conflict, recent fights over climate change have kicked those fights into a higher gear. Most Republicans, facing a Democratically controlled White House, House, and Senate, are anxious to impede any potential progress on Biden’s climate plan — or, like Abbott, to avoid taking responsibility for their own mismanagement of energy supply. Sowing doubt about the reliability of wind and solar, with the help of widespread misinformation on social media, can be yet another way to keep fossil fuels in business and slow down the pace of energy transition.
There are going to be more disasters, and worse ones, ahead. America will need to prepare its electricity grid for ice storms and heat waves, raise sea walls to keep the water out, and somehow shift the whole economy to clean (and, wherever possible, disaster-proof) renewable energy. It’s going to be near-impossible to do that if we can’t agree on what even happened.
In early 2020, Wilson Truong posted on the Nextdoor social media platform — where users can send messages to a group in their neighborhood — in a Culver City, California, community. Writing as if he were a resident of the Fox Hills neighborhood, Truong warned the group members that their city leaders were considering stronger building codes that would discourage natural gas lines in newly built homes and businesses. In a message with the subject line “Culver City banning gas stoves?” Truong wrote: “First time I heard about it I thought it was bogus, but I received a newsletter from the city about public hearings to discuss it…Will it pass???!!! I used an electric stove but it never cooked as well as a gas stove so I ended up switching back.”
Truong’s post ignited a debate. One neighbor, Chris, defended electric induction stoves. “Easy to clean,” he wrote about the glass stovetop, which uses a magnetic field to heat pans. Another user, Laura, was nearly incoherent in her outrage. “No way,” she wrote, “I am staying with gas. I hope you can too.”
What these commenters didn’t know was that Truong wasn’t their neighbor at all. He was writing in his role as account manager for the public relations firm Imprenta Communications Group. Imprenta’s client was Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, or C4BES, a front group for SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas utility, working to fend off state initiatives to limit the future use of gas in buildings. C4BES had tasked Imprenta with exploring how social media platforms, including Nextdoor, could be used to foment community opposition to electrification. Though Imprenta assured me this Nextdoor post was an isolated incident, the C4BES website displays Truong’s comment next to two other anonymous Nextdoor comments as evidence of their advocacy work in action.
The Nextdoor incident is just one of many examples of the newest front in the gas industry’s war to garner public support for their fuel. As more municipalities have moved to phase gas lines out of new buildings to cut down on methane emissions, gas utilities have gone on the defensive, launching anti-electrification campaigns across the country. To ward off a municipal vote in San Luis Obispo, California, during the pandemic, a union representing gas utility workers threatened to bus in “hundreds” of protesters with “no social distancing in place.” In Santa Barbara, California, residents have receivedrobotexts warning a gas ban would dramatically increase their bills. The Pacific Northwest group Partnership for Energy Progress, funded in part by Washington state’s largest natural gas utility, Puget Sound Energy, has spent at least $1 million opposing heating electrification in Bellingham and Seattle, including $91,000 on bus ads showing a happy family cooking with gas next to the slogan: “Reliable. Affordable. Natural Gas. Here for You.” In Oklahoma, Arizona, Louisiana, and Tennessee, where electrification campaigns have not yet taken off, the industry has worked aggressively with state legislatures to pass laws — up to a dozen are in the works — that would prevent cities from passing cleaner building codes.
The industry group American Gas Association has a website dedicated to promoting cooking with gas.
There’s a good reason for these Herculean efforts: Suddenly, the industry finds itself defending against electrification initiatives nationwide. And the behind-the-scenes lobbying is only one part of its massive anti-electrification crusade. Gas companies have launched an unusually effective stealth campaign of direct-to-consumer marketing to capture the loyalty and imaginations of the public. Surveys have found that most people would just as soon switch their water heaters and furnaces from gas to electric versions. So, gas companies have found a different appliance to focus on: gas stoves. Thanks in large part to gas company advertising, gas stoves — like granite countertops, farm sinks, and stainless-steel refrigerators — have become a coveted kitchen symbol of wealth, discernment, and status, not to mention a selling point for builders and realtors.
Until now, the stove strategy has been remarkably successful. But as electrification initiatives gain momentum, gas companies’ job is getting harder. Now that the industry is getting desperate, parts of its public relations infrastructure have begun cooling on this once-hot client.
Gas connections in American houses are at an all-time high. The share of gas stoves in newly constructed single-family homes climbed from below 30 percent in the 1970s to around 50 percent in 2019 (the data obviously excludes apartment buildings). Today, gas usage for heating, water, and cooking is uneven across the country. Data show 35 percent of Americans use a gas stove, though in some of the most populous cities — particularly those in New York, Illinois, and California — well over 70 percent of the population relies on gas for cooking. Residences also make up the lion’s share of the gas utility profits, making gas appliances a pivotal source for the future of industry growth.
Yet the popularity of gas may soon begin to wane. Americans are waking up to the fact that natural gas is a powerful contributor to climate change and source of air pollution — and that’s not even counting gas pipelines’ tendency to leak and explode. Climate emissions from gas- and oil-powered buildings make up a full 12 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Just a couple of decades ago, electricity wasn’t the obviously cleaner choice. Now it’s the main strategy for cleaning stubborn sources of pollution. If homes are fully electric, they’re bound to rely increasingly on renewable energy like solar and wind, but every new home that connects to the gas grid today will still be using fossil fuels in 15 years, no matter how much we clean up the electricity sector.
Already at least 42 municipalities across the United States have strengthened building codes to discourage expanding gas hookups in new construction, and the pace is picking up. New York City may soon join that number, while Seattle has settled for a compromise that bans gas appliances in commercial and multifamily homes without technically banning the stove in new construction. In 2021, Washington state will propose bans for gas furnaces and heating after 2030. California regulators have faced pressure to pass the most aggressive standards in the nation to make all newly constructed buildings electric by 2023. President Joe Biden’s campaign promised to implement new appliance and building-efficiency standards. Even with all the gas industry lobbying on the state level, more stringent federal rules could motivate builders to ditch gas hookups for good in new construction.
The dangers of gas stoves go beyond just heating the planet — they can also cause serious health problems. Gas stoves emit a host of dangerous pollutants, including particulate matter, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide. Carbon monoxide poisoning is a known killer, which homeowners assume can be prevented with detectors. But new research shows that the standard sensor doesn’t always pick up potentially dangerous carbon monoxide emissions — if a home even has working sensor at all. Nitrogen dioxide, which is not regulated indoors, has been linked to an increased risk of heart attacks, asthma, and other respiratory disease. In May, a literature review by the think tank RMI highlighted EPA research that found homes with gas stoves have anywhere between 50 and 400 percent higher concentrations of nitrogen dioxide than homes without. Children are especially at risk, according to a study by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health commissioned by Sierra Club: Epidemiological research suggests that kids in homes with gas stoves are 42 percent more likely to have asthma than children in homes with electric stoves. Running a stove and oven for just 45 minutes can produce pollution levels that would be illegal outdoors. One 2014 simulation by the Berkeley National Laboratory found that cooking with gas greatly increases carbon monoxide pollution by adding up to 3,000 parts per billion of carbon monoxide into the air after an hour — raising indoor carbon monoxide concentrations up to one-third for the average home.
Shelly Miller, a University of Colorado, Boulder, environmental engineer who has studied indoor air quality for decades, explains that household gas combustion is essentially the same as in a car. “Cooking,” she added, “is the number one way you’re polluting your home. It is causing respiratory and cardiovascular health problems; it can exacerbate flu and asthma and COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] in children.” Without ventilation, “you’re basically living in this toxic soup.”
Over the last century, the gas industry has worked wonders to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat. Gas companies have urged us not to think too hard — if at all — about what it means to combust a fossil fuel in our homes.
The gas and electric industries have been in a tug-of-war for dominance in buildings for well over a century. In the early 1900s, gas utilities looked “to other uses for their product; hence the intensive campaign in favor of cooking with gas,” a 1953 newspaper story from the Indiana Terre Haute Tribune reported. The story explains that “gas salesmen knocked on many doors before housewives would turn to gas for cooking fuel.” The industry embraced the term “natural gas,” which gave the impression that its product was cleaner than any other fossil fuel: A 1934 ad bragged, “The discovery of Natural Gas brought to man the greater and most efficient heating fuel which the world has ever known. Justly is it called — nature’s perfect fuel.”
In the 1930s, the industry invented the catchphrase “cooking with gas,” and by the 1950s it was targeting housewives with star-studded commercials of matinee idols scheming how to get their husbands torenovate their kitchens. In a newspaper advertisement by the Pennsylvania People’s Natural Gas Company in 1964, the star Marlene Dietrich vouched, “Every recipe I give is closely related to cooking with gas. If forced, I can cook on an electric stove but it is not a happy union.” (That was around the same timeGeneral Electric waged an advertising campaignstarring future president Ronald Reagan that showed an all-electric house as the Jetson-like future for a modern home.) In 1988 the industry produced acringeworthy rapabout stoves. “I cook with gas cause the cost is much less/ Than ‘lectricity, do you want to take a guess?” and “I cook with gas cause broiling’s so clean/ The flame consumes the smoke and grease.”
Beginning in the 1990s, the gas industry faced an extra challenge: the mounting evidence that gas in our homes causes serious health problems. Its main strategy has been to exploit the lack of regulation and the uncertainties of science to help lull the public into indifference. Environmentalists say the strategy harks back to how the tobacco industry fought evidence of the dangers of smoking.
The industry claims that there are no documented risks to one’s health from gas stoves, citing the lack of regulation from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA as evidence of why the public shouldn’t be concerned. (To be clear, the EPA has not said gas stoves are safe. Indeed, its 2016 Integrated Science Assessment was the first time the agency linked short-term and long-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide to health problems like asthma. UCLA public health researchers found that indoor nitrogen dioxide emissions from running a stove and oven can rival that from outdoor levels the EPA would consider illegal. Indeed, UCLA data shows California’s biggest source of nitrogen dioxide emissions comes not from power plants, but from gas appliances.)
The industry also claims that proper ventilation mitigates some of the risks of cooking with gas. That’s true, but mostly impractical: Many American families can’t afford to install an exhaust hood, a chimney-like vent that sucks up the emissions and releases them outside, and there’s certainly no regulation requiring it. Instead, most homes just have fans above the stove that recirculate the polluted air inside the home, or nothing at all. Because of dated building codes and an unregulated market, low-income Americans have to put up with gas filling their homes with invisible pollutants in cramped spaces.
In the last few years, the industry has encountered increasing resistance to its claims that natural gas is perfectly safe. Last June, I published a piece that exposed how gas groups representing utilities hired social media influencers to convince millennials and Gen Xers that gas stoves are the superior way to cook. The two main campaigns are the work of the gas trade groups the American Public Gas Association, a collection of public and municipal utilities, and the American Gas Association, which is comprised of privately owned utilities. These groups have hired prominent public relations firms to seek out influencers who emphasize — and whose presence embodies — the cool factor of gas cooking while mentioning none of the risks. In fact, in the posts I reviewed, none of the influencers appeared to have a hood over their stoves, or even to mention ventilation. I knew I had caught the industry’s attention with the story when many of the Instagram posts embedded in the piece were soon deleted, and I started receiving long, mostly unsolicited emails from the industry’s various consultants.
I didn’t know how they had reacted to the negative press until I read a trove of emails obtained through a public records request by the fossil fuel watchdog Climate Investigations Center. According to the emails, representatives from the public relations firm Porter Novelli reached out to their client, the American Public Gas Association, which then asked gas executives at several utilities if its campaign should be paused in light of the backlash. The answer was a definitive no. “They should not stop for even 1 hour,” one utility executive, industry veteran Sue Kristjansson, replied in an email. “And…. if they are saying that we are paying influencers to gush over gas stoves so be it. Of course we are and maybe we should pay them to gush more?”
The emails show gas executives debating their next move: Some thought they should tell the influencers to emphasize guidance around proper ventilation for gas stoves; others, including Kristjansson, wanted to downplay the risks posed by gas stoves altogether. Kristjansson worried that giving even an inch to the critics would be the same as admitting defeat. “If we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done,” Kristjansson wrote.
(Since she sent those emails, Kristjansson has moved on to become the president of Berkshire Gas in Massachusetts. When I reached her for comment about her dismissal of the science, the utility sent me a statement on her behalf, repeating familiar claims: “The science around the safe use of natural gas for cooking is clear: there are no documented risks to respiratory health from natural gas stoves from the regulatory and advisory agencies and organizations responsible for protecting residential consumer health and safety.”)
Yet Kristjannson’s hard-liner approach of downplaying the health risks of natural gas seems to be losing favor. Take the example of Kate Arends, the founder of Wit and Delight, a polished lifestyle website for “designing a life well-lived,” and an Instagram account with more than 300,000 followers. Arends’ brand fits perfectly into the affluent female demographic that the gas industry wants to target — and indeed, at least one of Arends’ posts is sponsored by the American Public Gas Association, or APGA.
A week after my story was published, Porter Novelli contacted APGA again, wanting more guidance on how to communicate on “issues related to ventilation,” on behalf of Arends, who wanted to make sure the health and safety information she shared with her followers was accurate. Months passed — by fall I had not seen any sponsored posts from Arends and wondered if she had dropped the sponsorship.
In late October, Arends ran a post sponsored by Natural Gas Genius, the campaign run by APGA: “An Exercise in Candlemaking and the Comforts of a Roaring Fire.” In a 600-word post festooned with photos of her exquisitely decorated and brightly colored home, Arends explained her decision to replace her old wood-burning fireplace with a natural gas model, while extolling the wonders of her gas stove.
Tellingly, Arends’ post includes a note that shows how influencers and the industry have grown savvier on the delicate issue of air quality. “If natural gas is the right choice for your family,” she wrote, “ventilation and air quality are the things to keep top of mind.” It was the first time I had seen an influencer acknowledge the need for ventilation when using a gas appliance. Could it be, I wondered, that these pseudo-celebrities were beginning to have misgivings about their beloved gas stoves?
So far, every city that has tried to pass cleaner building codes has faced an onslaught of gas industry attacks. Sierra Club’s Western Regional Director Evan Gillespie remembers how quickly the gas utility SoCalGas had ramped up its presence just two years ago when one obscure California agency, the South Coast Air Quality District, sought to look at the full emissions impact from gas appliances. Gas groups sent one representative to one meeting, then three to the next, and seven to the third, accounting for a full third of the small meeting’s attendance. Leah Stokes, a political science professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of a book on utility astroturfing, described the unsettling experience in January of seeing how quickly the SoCalGas-aligned Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions swamped the Santa Barbara council after sending residents texts and emails warning of higher electricity rates and gas stove bans.
But the tables seem to be turning. In November, the powerful environmental regulators at the California Air Resources Board issued an unequivocal statement establishing that gas stoves cause indoor air pollution. The board’s announcement could be a game-changer for cities still on the fence about electrification by recommending “stronger kitchen ventilation standards and electrification of appliances, including stoves, ovens, furnaces, and space and water heaters, in the 2022 code cycle for all new buildings in order to protect public health, improve indoor and outdoor air quality, reduce GHG emissions, and set California on track to achieve carbon neutrality.” The statement marked the first time any major public agency recommended a change of policy to match the science of stoves and indoor air pollution.
Environmentalists liken the move away from gas to the inevitability of coal’s demise in the power sector. They say it’s not a matter of if buildings go electric, but when. If the California Energy Commission declines to issue the all-electric standards for 2022, then it is expected to strengthen ventilation standards, and eventually to ban gas in new construction in 2026. The possibility of a gas ban has sent the industry scrambling: In the event that California’s most populous cities — which account for 8 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gasses for buildings — ban gas hookups in new construction, other states are likely to follow suit.
“If we’re able to get gas bans in new buildings, then these gas companies are losing their growth, they’re losing their new market share, and they’re going to start shrinking,” said Stokes. “With private companies, that sort of downward spiral becomes very problematic, because then investors start to think this isn’t a good company to invest in, or they don’t have a future. The fights that are playing out in California and New York are really bellwethers for the gas industry overall.”
Just as with coal, the pervasive use of natural gas is becoming unjustifiable from both an environmental and a public health perspective. And public relations firms are noticing. In November, Porter Novelli announced that it would drop the American Public Gas Association as a client and would cease its participation in the Natural Gas Genius Campaign. While Porter Novelli declined to comment for this story, the firm’s global chief of staff Maggie Graham explained to the New Yorker, “We have determined our work with the American Public Gas Association is incongruous with our increased focus and priority on addressing climate justice — we will no longer support that work beyond 2020.”
Another recent example of a PR firm parting ways with a gas client happened in Culver City, where Truong made the pro-gas Nextdoor post. When I asked C4BES’s public relations company, Imprenta, about the effort to garner pro-gas stove community support, vice president Joe Zago distanced his company from the incident. He told me he wasn’t aware that Truong had posted the Nextdoor comment himself. Zago said C4BES had tasked Imprenta to find a sympathetic resident of the middle-class Fox Hills neighborhood to post a statement supporting C4BES’s position. Under time pressure, Zago said, “our staff member, on his own behalf, decided to move ahead and post under his own name. He made this post on his own without direction or approval from anyone at Imprenta and without the knowledge of Imprenta or our client.” When I reached out to C4BES for comment, the group’s executive director Jon Switalski responded that his group “supports California’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however an ideological solution that places increased burdens on working families is not the only path to decarbonization.” Imprenta told me that its contract with C4BES expired in February 2020. (The groups are also the subject of a California consumer advocacy investigation about improperly using ratepayers’ dollars for other campaigns against electrification.)
Environmentalists point to the examples of PR firms dropping their gas-industry clients as evidence of a shift in public sentiment on gas. “I think people’s perception of what it means to have a gas stove changes pretty quickly,” Gillespie said. Consumers are beginning to realize, “I’m burning fossil fuels with an open flame in my house, and it’s contributing to asthma my kid has; it’s harming my mom, my dad, and my grandparents.”
The gas industry has spent a century convincing Americans to fall in love with gas stoves, and there’s no telling how it will recover if that relationship sours. As the public begins to fully understand the environmental and health risks of what used to be their favorite appliance, Gillespie predicts, “what was long seen as this great strength of the industry is actually their greatest weakness.”
A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.
Hello, I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today is Day 24 of the Biden administration. This week, President Biden’s climate agenda hit the international stage.
Congress passed its first climate bill way back in 1987. The Global Climate Protection Act directed the president to establish a task force to create a national and international climate strategy. Who introduced it? A sprightly 45-year-old senator from Delaware named Joe Biden. However, the legislation would run into a major roadblock: Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, never established the task force.
Fast-forward three decades and President Biden now has the political heft to make climate action happen. “Climate change will be the center of our national security and foreign policy,” he said in January. Just below the headlines dominated by Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, there are signs the current president’s vision is starting to take shape.
On Monday, Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a conversation aimed at, among other things, renewing “their partnership on climate change.” On Wednesday, the president had a phone call with President Xi Jingping of China. While topics like China’s human rights abuses against ethnic minorities caused moments of tension between the two leaders, they agreed that global health security, weapons proliferation, and climate change are shared challenges facing both nations.
Meanwhile, Biden’s team has been working to carry out his executive orders aimed at international climate cooperation and national security. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been charged with devising a “climate finance plan” that will, in part, help developing nations cut their emissions and become more resilient to the effects of planetary warming. Biden’s energy secretary will play a role here, too, fostering international collaboration on clean energy technologies. Biden’s nomination of former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to lead the Energy Department will soon advance to the full Senate for a confirmation vote.
Biden also signed another executive order last week that gives a slew of federal agencies six months to come up with a report on climate change and its impact on migration. That report will look at the national security implications of heat, drought, and other consequences of warming forcing people to flee their homes.
Climate migration — already taking place in countries like Syria and South Sudan, where extreme heat has sparked conflict, and in island nations threatened by sea-level rise — is poised to become a major challenge on the geopolitical landscape over the next three decades. The executive order directs agencies to include in their report “opportunities to work collaboratively with other countries, international organizations and bodies, non-governmental organizations, and localities” to respond to climate migration.
After four years of an administration that eschewed global cooperation on virtually all fronts, it’s clear that President Biden is looking at a whole-of-the-world approach.
But Wait … There’s More.
Big Business is getting nervous about Biden’s climate agenda. Democrats want new rules on climate risk that would require banks, energy producers, and other companies to disclose threats to their businesses posed by warming to their investors. Corporations and Republican legislators could close ranks to oppose such measures.
Will Keystone XL come back from the dead? Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has asked President Biden to reconsider his decision to kill the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Manchin, the new chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Biden’s executive order revoking a presidential permit for the project will cost the U.S. jobs.
What to expect when you’re expecting climate executive orders. White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy told E&E News that Biden will issue more presidential decrees aimed at curbing global warming. “There is more to come,” she promised.
Not to be outdone by Elon Musk, the White House announced the creation of a $100-million fund for low-carbon tech administered by the Department of Energy. It also revealed a new working group that will foster the development of emerging technologies: everything from net-zero buildings to carbon-free hydrogen to direct air-capture systems.
In 2016, sensors began picking up an illegal gas billowing into the atmosphere from eastern China. The gas, CFC-11, was banned in 2010 under the Montreal Protocol — the international treaty to eliminate substances that wreck the Earth’s protective ozone layer. CFC-11 also warms Earth with 5,000 times the intensity of carbon dioxide. Years of efforts to protect the ozone layer might be reversed if the emissions continued, experts warned. An undercover investigation pinpointed the source of the emissions, and governments pressed the Chinese government to crack down.
Now, a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journal Nature show that the emissions rising from eastern China have fallen enough to put the ozone layer on course for recovery. It’s an early test case for international agreements policing illegal emissions, and could become a precedent for cracking down on other greenhouse gases.
“If we had been asleep at the wheel, and not in a position to tell the world something was wrong, it could have been a real problem,” said Stephen Montzka, an author of one of the papers and part of a team at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals. And when Montzka says “a real problem” it’s an understatement: Without the protection of the ozone layer, the sun that warms our skins and feeds our crops becomes a blowtorch of blistering radiation. “If the ozone layer were to go away, life on earth wouldn’t be sustainable in the form we know it today,” Montzka said.
NOAA and the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment, an international group of researchers, operate a global network of sensors, sniffing the air from remote islands and mountaintops to detect changes in the atmosphere. Ever since the 1990s, when the Montreal Protocol started phasing out chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals, CFC-11 had been steadily falling out of the atmosphere, until 2012, when the decline of CFC-11 concentrations slowed to a crawl. Scientists scrambled to figure out what was happening, poring over the data from the network of sensors. Two island-based sniffers, one off the southern coast of Korea and one of the southern coast of Japan, had registered a suspicious increase in the gas. It looked as if it was blowing out of a region in China where factories produce insulating foam — one of CFC-11’s main uses before it was banned. But the sensors drawing in chemicals off the breeze could only provide a general sense of where it was coming from.
“We aren’t pointing at a factory, we are pointing at a region,” said Luke Western, an author of one of the papers who studies atmospheric gases at the University of Bristol.
Still, it was enough to trigger an investigation by the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, based in London. It sent undercover agents into the region to discreetly ask factory managers what kinds of substances they were using to manufacture their foams.
“The people our investigative teams spoke to were quite blasé,” said Avipsa Mahapatra, the organization’s climate campaign lead. “They knew CFC-11 was illegal, but its use was the norm for factories in that part of China.”
The reaction was swift. The countries that signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 take it seriously, Montzka said. They send experts to meet twice a year, every year, to review progress and negotiate changes. So when scientists reported something was wrong, they were ready.
“Not a lot of oxygen was wasted in negotiating the numbers or asking if it was a real problem,” Mahapatra said. “We saw unprecedented enforcement actions in China.”
And these new studies suggest the crackdown is working. Mahapatra cheers the success, but urges vigilance. “This was one of the largest environmental crimes of the century. China only recovered small amounts of gas — is the rest stockpiled somewhere? How was this being produced? Where were the gases coming from? We haven’t seen an answer to those questions,” she said.
It’s crucial that the world figures out how to effectively monitor and stop illegal emissions to protect the ozone layer and, eventually, the climate, Montzka said. Someday, these same techniques could be used to spot an illicit coal plant and lead to a raid that shuts it down.
In his first 15 days in office, President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, pledged to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies from the federal government, and started the process of unwinding Trump’s disastrous environmental legacy. And now a trio of Democratic lawmakers wants President Biden to declare a “climate emergency” as soon as possible.
Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, along with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, announced plans to introduce legislation on Thursday that would mandate Biden make such a declaration. The bill compares the action needed on the climate crisis to the wartime mobilization during World War II and urges Biden to declare an emergency under the National Emergencies Act, thus unlocking more than 100 additional presidential powers to tackle the crisis. “It’s past time that a climate emergency is declared,” Blumenauer said in a statement. “This bill can finally get it done.”
The proposed legislation follows a statement last week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who urged Biden to declare an emergency to bypass Republican heel-dragging in Congress. “If there ever was an emergency, climate change is one,” Schumer said.
The U.S. wouldn’t be the first country to call climate change a crisis. To date, 38 countries around the world — including Japan, New Zealand, and the European Union — have declared similar “climate emergencies.” But most of those declarations have been symbolic resolutions, and so haven’t come with any additional tools to address the overheating planet.
In the U.S., however, the National Emergencies Act could give Biden real powers: The president could use the declaration to reinstitute a ban on crude oil exports, send emergency aid packages to states, or even redirect billions of dollars of funding away from defense projects and toward the production of renewable energy. President Trump tried to use the act in 2019 to funnel money from the Pentagon to his project to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but was rebuffed by the courts and Congress.
These would be big, sweeping actions, but they also might upset Republican members of Congress, who are already criticizing Biden’s spree of executive orders as presidential overreach and whose support Biden might need to tackle some of his other legislative goals. Some have also argued that, even when done with the best of intentions, declaring a national emergency serves as an end-run around the democratic process.
The bill looks like a long shot at the moment, given both the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate and the fact that its only purpose is to encourage Biden to use his presidential powers. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a similar resolution in 2019 that won support from many senators and representatives but never came up to a vote in the Democratic-controlled House. Still, the new bill may serve as a potent symbol — a sign that there is growing pressure on Biden to act swiftly on climate change, whether Republicans like it or not.
It’s got Will Ferrell. It’s got Awkwafina. And it’s got … electric vehicles?
“It” in this case is General Motors’ new Super Bowl ad, which the company released Wednesday on Twitter. The ad features Will Ferrell, beard shaggy from COVID-19 quarantine, smashing his fist through a classroom globe when he realizes that Norway has a higher number of electric vehicles per person than the U.S.
“We’re gonna crush those lugers!” Ferrell says, driving his shiny GM car to the actor Kenan Thompson’s house. Thompson, dressed like a pirate for his daughter’s birthday, looks suitably bewildered.
General Motors is in the middle of an electric vehicle publicity blitz, following their promise — announced last week — to end sales of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars by 2035. In October, the company also released plans for its “Hummer EV,” an all-electric version of the monstrous, gas-guzzling behemoth that still tears through some suburban American streets. (The first edition of this new “super truck” sold out within 10 minutes.)
It’s a wild turnaround for an automaker that — until November of last year — had been resisting cutting the amount of carbon dioxide its vehicles spewed into the atmosphere. In October of 2019, General Motors sided with the Trump administration in a legal battle, pushing back against California’s stricter requirements to cut climate-warming pollutants from cars. But in November, after Joe Biden was elected president, the company seemed to see the writing on the wall.
“President-elect Biden recently said, ‘I believe that we can own the 21st century car market again by moving to electric vehicles,’” Mary Barra, CEO and chairman of General Motors said in a statement at the time. “We at General Motors couldn’t agree more.”
From an economic standpoint, however, the company didn’t have much of a choice. China — the largest single market for General Motors vehicles — has vowed to allow sales of only “eco-friendly” cars by 2035, meaning mostly electric vehicles and hybrids. And in September, California made a similar pledge, promising to prevent sales of all but “zero-emission” vehicles by 2035.
Now, General Motors is surging ahead, promising to release 30 new electric vehicles and add 2,700 electric charging stations to the country’s network by 2025. And it’s doing so not by appealing to the values environmentalists hold dear — hatred of consumerism, protecting wide-open natural spaces — but by hitting on some uniquely American virtues: bigness (an electric Hummer!), and beating other countries (watch out, Norway!). The ad is airing during the Super Bowl, after all.
The U.S. won’t be able to catch up to Norway anytime soon: 6.5 percent of the vehicles on the Scandinavian country’s roads are electric, compared with only 0.3 percent in the U.S. But President Biden has also promised to replace all vehicles in the U.S. fleet (there are 645,000 of them, including a whole bunch of postal trucks that sometimes catch on fire) with EVs, and momentum is building to electrify cars across the country. Change, as they say, happens slowly — and then all at once.
It’s got Will Ferrell. It’s got Awkwafina. And it’s got … electric vehicles?
“It” in this case is General Motors’ new Super Bowl ad, which the company released Wednesday on Twitter. The ad features Will Ferrell, beard shaggy from COVID-19 quarantine, smashing his fist through a classroom globe when he realizes that Norway has a higher number of electric vehicles per person than the U.S.
“We’re gonna crush those lugers!” Ferrell says, driving his shiny GM car to the actor Kenan Thompson’s house. Thompson, dressed like a pirate for his daughter’s birthday, looks suitably bewildered.
General Motors is in the middle of an electric vehicle publicity blitz, following their promise — announced last week — to end sales of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars by 2035. In October, the company also released plans for its “Hummer EV,” an all-electric version of the monstrous, gas-guzzling behemoth that still tears through some suburban American streets. (The first edition of this new “super truck” sold out within 10 minutes.)
It’s a wild turnaround for an automaker that — until November of last year — had been resisting cutting the amount of carbon dioxide its vehicles spewed into the atmosphere. In October of 2019, General Motors sided with the Trump administration in a legal battle, pushing back against California’s stricter requirements to cut climate-warming pollutants from cars. But in November, after Joe Biden was elected president, the company seemed to see the writing on the wall.
“President-elect Biden recently said, ‘I believe that we can own the 21st century car market again by moving to electric vehicles,’” Mary Barra, CEO and chairman of General Motors said in a statement at the time. “We at General Motors couldn’t agree more.”
From an economic standpoint, however, the company didn’t have much of a choice. China — the largest single market for General Motors vehicles — has vowed to allow sales of only “eco-friendly” cars by 2035, meaning mostly electric vehicles and hybrids. And in September, California made a similar pledge, promising to prevent sales of all but “zero-emission” vehicles by 2035.
Now, General Motors is surging ahead, promising to release 30 new electric vehicles and add 2,700 electric charging stations to the country’s network by 2025. And it’s doing so not by appealing to the values environmentalists hold dear — hatred of consumerism, protecting wide-open natural spaces — but by hitting on some uniquely American virtues: bigness (an electric Hummer!), and beating other countries (watch out, Norway!). The ad is airing during the Super Bowl, after all.
The U.S. won’t be able to catch up to Norway anytime soon: 6.5 percent of the vehicles on the Scandinavian country’s roads are electric, compared with only 0.3 percent in the U.S. But President Biden has also promised to replace all vehicles in the U.S. fleet (there are 645,000 of them, including a whole bunch of postal trucks that sometimes catch on fire) with EVs, and momentum is building to electrify cars across the country. Change, as they say, happens slowly — and then all at once.
Coal’s grip on the global electricity sector is loosening as more utilities and companies invest in renewable energy. But one major coal consumer — the steel industry — is finding it harder to kick its habit.
Steel companies make nearly 2 billion tons of high-strength material every year for bridges, buildings, railways, and roads. The furnaces that melt iron ore to make steel consume vast amounts of coal. As a result, the industry accounts for roughly 8 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions, as well as a toxic soup of air pollutants.
Steelmakers worldwide are facing mounting pressure from government regulators and consumers to decarbonize operations. Doing so is essential to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and staving off most of the worst effects of climate change, experts say. In recent months, the world’s three top producers — Europe’s ArcelorMittal, China’s Baowu Steel, and Japan’s Nippon Steel — committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, echoing targets set in their home countries.
But in order to curb steel’s carbon emissions, the sector will have to transform how the material is traditionally made.
Outside Boston, in the industrial suburb of Woburn, one company is working to replace coal with electrons. Boston Metal, an outfit spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, uses electric currents to heat iron ore into a bright orange-white liquid, which converts into metal and cools as gray steel blocks. The process doesn’t create greenhouse gas emissions, and when powered with renewable electricity, can be completely emissions-free.
Tadeu Carneiro, the company’s CEO, said Boston Metal is “ushering in a new era of metallurgy.” The nine-year-old startup raised $50 million in January from a slew of investors, including the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the venture capital arm of BHP, one of the world’s biggest mining companies. The new funding will allow it to build a demonstration plant in Woburn that can produce 25,000 tons of metal per year; so far, the company has made only several tons of steel in total.
Boston Metal’s approach is one of a handful of breakthrough technologies with the potential to decarbonize steelmaking. Companies are piloting systems across Europe that use hydrogen in furnaces in lieu of coal. In Brazil, some steel mills are mixing in biochar, which is made from agricultural waste. Other firms are continuing the use of coal, but are considering retrofitting facilities with carbon capture devices to negate emissions.
Testing and scaling technologies that remove the emissions from steelmaking isn’t the only challenge to decarbonizing the building material. Greener products must also compete in an industry with relatively low profit margins and an excess supply of inexpensive Chinese steel.
To level the playing field, public agencies and private businesses will need to set policies that encourage buying emissions-free steel, or make it more expensive to purchase conventional supplies, said Nate Aden, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute who studies industrial sector transformations. (California, for instance, limits the total amount of carbon emissions associated with steel and other materials used in state-backed construction projects.)
“We haven’t had nearly enough research and development in this space for the past couple decades,” Aden said. “It’s exciting.”
About 70 percent of steel today is made how it’s always been made: in giant, extremely hot furnaces. Purified coal, or “coke,” is heated and melted with iron oxide and limestone, then injected with oxygen to reduce the carbon content of the mixture and to remove impurities.
Almost all other steel is made from scrap metal that’s melted down in an electric arc furnace. This approach doesn’t use coke as a raw material. But it does require significant amounts of electricity to heat metal to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — and most of that power comes from coal-fired power plants.
At Boston Metal’s research facility, the steelmaking process takes place inside a squat metal cylinder called an electrolytic cell. Electricity is fed in from the top and flows through a chimney-like tube made from a chromium-based alloy. The electric current then passes across a liquid solution made of iron oxide and other metallic minerals. This heats the oxide melt and drives chemical reactions that result in the production of oxygen gas and liquid iron. Oxygen bubbles to the top, while fortified iron pools at the chamber’s bottom and eventually hardens into steel.
Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at MIT, said he first got the idea for “molten oxide electrolysis” decades ago while researching alternative ways to produce aluminum, another metal made via a carbon-intensive process. In 2012, he co-founded Boston Electrometallurgical (a.k.a. Boston Metal) with two partners, and they began testing the method in laboratory cells the size of highball tumbler glasses. The company now runs three pilot lines at the Woburn facility.
With the $50 million investment from Breakthrough, BHP, and others, Sadoway said the goal is to demonstrate the technology at a scale large enough to convince investors to back construction of an industrial facility. If that future plant comes to fruition, he estimates Boston Metal’s process will use about 20 percent less energy than a conventional blast furnace. And if the facility can use cheap, plentiful renewable electricity, perhaps from a hydropower plant, its steel would cost less than the competition.
“At scale, we expect to make better metal at lower cost and with no CO2 emissions,” he said.
As Boston Metal expands its efforts in electrolysis, many steel companies are placing their bets on hydrogen to curb emissions.
Hydrogen doesn’t emit greenhouse gases when burned and can be made by using renewable electricity to bust up water molecules (although most hydrogen today is made with natural gas, through a process called steam methane reforming). In steelmaking, hydrogen sets off a chemical reaction that removes oxygen from iron ore, eliminating the need for purified coal in the blast furnace.
Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal is building a demonstration plant using this method — called hydrogen-DRI, for “direct reduced iron” — in Germany. Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plans to trial the technology this year at a 250,000-ton per year steel plant in Austria. And in Sweden, steelmaker SSAB and its partners have built a pilot plant to produce hydrogen supplies and test hydrogen-DRI, using only hydroelectric power for both operations.
Building a hydrogen-based steel industry will require significant spending to not only build new plants but also produce, transport, and store green hydrogen. For these projects to be economically viable in the world of cheap steel, the prices of hydrogen and renewable electricity must drop considerably, while the price of carbon dioxide must rise, Aden wrote in a 2020 paper as part of an international team of experts.
There’s another longer-term challenge for new, clean projects. Demand for steel is declining or stagnating in key markets, including the United States and Japan. Producers are already making more steel than the world needs. Meanwhile, construction companies and car makers are increasingly using lightweight aluminum, plastics, and even wood in their projects. That could make it harder to justify future investments or research, according to Aden.
Still, the steel industry remains an essential part of the world economy — as well as a significant source of the world’s emissions.
“What’s clear is that we’ll be needing steel for the next few decades,” Aden said. “So I think all these new projects are worthwhile.”
When Democrats hit the federal trifecta that is control of the Senate, presidency, and the House of Representatives, they won a rare chance to pass new laws. The question is, which new laws will they prioritize, given the party only has two years before that window of opportunity likely closes?
After a decade of build up, Democrats’ to-do list is looking robust, to say the least. They have promised to lock in policy to reverse climate change, pass a new voting rights bill, reform policing, overhaul immigration, and finally lock in the health care system of their dreams. Oh, and thwart the spread of COVID-19, of course. There are more options than there is time; the president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterm elections, and If Democrats lose even a single seat in the Senate, they will become the minority.
With Democrats’ window of opportunity already beginning to close, the party has to choose its priorities carefully. Less than a month into the 116th Congress, it’s already possible to see how the politics of setting these priorities are playing out. Here’s what we know so far:
Priority #1 is impeachment
The drive to convict former President Donald Trump for his role in inciting January’s Capitol riot has pushed impeachment to the head of the party’s priority line — a sign that Democrats aren’t going to be bloodlessly efficient about passing their policy agenda.
It would take 67 senators to convict Trump — all 50 Democrats and 17 Republicans — and there’s almost no chance of that happening. Still, there’s an argument for taking the time to conduct the trial, said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research organization. “Trump’s behavior was so exceptional, that it may be worthwhile to take really aggressive steps to disincentivize the type of behavior we saw from President Trump in the future,” she said. In other words, impeachment’s important enough that Democrats think they have to try for it, even if the odds are stacked against them.
While impeachment hearings seem like they would compete with the Democrats’ early chances of passing new laws, the slow pace with which most bills actually move through Congress makes that kind of overlap pretty unlikely. The idea that Democrats would come in on day one and start passing one bill after another is simply unrealistic, said Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “You have to go back to the 1930s, when, yes, they passed a lot of stuff really fast. But since then, the 2009 stimulus is the only major legislation that passed in the first 100 days since the New Deal. That’s it!”
After impeachment, Democrats will likely turn to passing another COVID-19 relief bill. Only then will they gear up for their first big priority, likely election reform, Glassman said, likely in the summer or fall. That’s a pace that fits with historical precedent. It’s also a pace that will force Democrats to choose to focus on just a couple of items from their agenda.
McConnell is still McConnell
Before Inauguration, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told Biden he was open to impeaching Trump, a move that would surgically cut the now-former president out of politics. That comment initially led some to wonder if there was an opportunity for cooperation between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. But in the first days of the new Biden administration, it became clear that there was no grand reconciliation in the offing. McConnell held up the organization of the Senate — usually just a formality to hand over the gavel to the new majority — for days, trying to extract promises from Democrats. “It suggests that McConnell is unlikely to be terribly cooperative. It’s a strong sign that we are not in a new Senate,” Reynolds said.
Instead, McConnell is likely to keep throwing sand into the gears of politics, an art he perfected the last time Democrats had control of Congress (from 2009 to 2011). It’s even possible that he may have dangled the possibility of impeachment before Democrats as bait. Glassman says he does think McConnell is genuinely concerned about Trump’s influence, but now that the second impeachment is underway, McConnell has every reason to stretch the process out. Biden, on the other hand, would like to get it over with and focus on policy.
Hard partisanship will likely remain the norm, but McConnell also knows he can’t push too far as Senate minority leader. He doesn’t want his obstruction to infuriate the moderate Democrats — like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who, so far, have said they won’t vote to abolish the filibuster.
Climate votes will be tough
There is a glimmer of bipartisanship in the Senate: A group of eight Republicans and eight Democrats are cooperating to get a coronavirus relief package passed. Politicians on both sides of the aisle agree that the government should step in to help with the pandemic. But that’s as far as the consensus goes. They don’t agree, for example, that the government should step in to help with climate change.
There’s a recurring pattern in which moderates lose their jobs for taking tough, pro-environment stands on issues, only to watch those efforts fizzle. Glassman remembers Marjorie Margolis-Mesvinsky, a Democrat from a conservative Pennsylvania district, tearfully walking down the aisle of the House in 1993 to announce that she would vote to tax each British Thermal Unit, or BTU, of fossil fuels burned. The bill didn’t even make it to the Senate and she lost her reelection bid. After that, “getting BTU’d” became Washington D.C. slang for losing reelection for a fruitless cause.
Yes, there are Republicans who swear journalists to secrecy and then admit they’d like to vote to reverse climate change. But they aren’t going to stick their necks out and risk getting BTU’d unless they think a bill can actually pass. “I have a hard time seeing major climate legislation with the razor-thin margins Democrats have in the Senate, and moderates already looking to the midterm elections,” Glassman said.
When Democrats hit the federal trifecta that is control of the Senate, presidency, and the House of Representatives, they won a rare chance to pass new laws. The question is, which new laws will they prioritize, given the party only has two years before that window of opportunity likely closes?
After a decade of build up, Democrats’ to-do list is looking robust, to say the least. They have promised to lock in policy to reverse climate change, pass a new voting rights bill, reform policing, overhaul immigration, and finally lock in the health care system of their dreams. Oh, and thwart the spread of COVID-19, of course. There are more options than there is time; the president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterm elections, and If Democrats lose even a single seat in the Senate, they will become the minority.
With Democrats’ window of opportunity already beginning to close, the party has to choose its priorities carefully. Less than a month into the 116th Congress, it’s already possible to see how the politics of setting these priorities are playing out. Here’s what we know so far:
Priority #1 is impeachment
The drive to convict former President Donald Trump for his role in inciting January’s Capitol riot has pushed impeachment to the head of the party’s priority line — a sign that Democrats aren’t going to be bloodlessly efficient about passing their policy agenda.
It would take 67 senators to convict Trump — all 50 Democrats and 17 Republicans — and there’s almost no chance of that happening. Still, there’s an argument for taking the time to conduct the trial, said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research organization. “Trump’s behavior was so exceptional, that it may be worthwhile to take really aggressive steps to disincentivize the type of behavior we saw from President Trump in the future,” she said. In other words, impeachment’s important enough that Democrats think they have to try for it, even if the odds are stacked against them.
While impeachment hearings seem like they would compete with the Democrats’ early chances of passing new laws, the slow pace with which most bills actually move through Congress makes that kind of overlap pretty unlikely. The idea that Democrats would come in on day one and start passing one bill after another is simply unrealistic, said Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “You have to go back to the 1930s, when, yes, they passed a lot of stuff really fast. But since then, the 2009 stimulus is the only major legislation that passed in the first 100 days since the New Deal. That’s it!”
After impeachment, Democrats will likely turn to passing another COVID-19 relief bill. Only then will they gear up for their first big priority, likely election reform, Glassman said, likely in the summer or fall. That’s a pace that fits with historical precedent. It’s also a pace that will force Democrats to choose to focus on just a couple of items from their agenda.
McConnell is still McConnell
Before Inauguration, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told Biden he was open to impeaching Trump, a move that would surgically cut the now-former president out of politics. That comment initially led some to wonder if there was an opportunity for cooperation between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. But in the first days of the new Biden administration, it became clear that there was no grand reconciliation in the offing. McConnell held up the organization of the Senate — usually just a formality to hand over the gavel to the new majority — for days, trying to extract promises from Democrats. “It suggests that McConnell is unlikely to be terribly cooperative. It’s a strong sign that we are not in a new Senate,” Reynolds said.
Instead, McConnell is likely to keep throwing sand into the gears of politics, an art he perfected the last time Democrats had control of Congress (from 2009 to 2011). It’s even possible that he may have dangled the possibility of impeachment before Democrats as bait. Glassman says he does think McConnell is genuinely concerned about Trump’s influence, but now that the second impeachment is underway, McConnell has every reason to stretch the process out. Biden, on the other hand, would like to get it over with and focus on policy.
Hard partisanship will likely remain the norm, but McConnell also knows he can’t push too far as Senate minority leader. He doesn’t want his obstruction to infuriate the moderate Democrats — like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who, so far, have said they won’t vote to abolish the filibuster.
Climate votes will be tough
There is a glimmer of bipartisanship in the Senate: A group of eight Republicans and eight Democrats are cooperating to get a coronavirus relief package passed. Politicians on both sides of the aisle agree that the government should step in to help with the pandemic. But that’s as far as the consensus goes. They don’t agree, for example, that the government should step in to help with climate change.
There’s a recurring pattern in which moderates lose their jobs for taking tough, pro-environment stands on issues, only to watch those efforts fizzle. Glassman remembers Marjorie Margolis-Mesvinsky, a Democrat from a conservative Pennsylvania district, tearfully walking down the aisle of the House in 1993 to announce that she would vote to tax each British Thermal Unit, or BTU, of fossil fuels burned. The bill didn’t even make it to the Senate and she lost her reelection bid. After that, “getting BTU’d” became Washington D.C. slang for losing reelection for a fruitless cause.
Yes, there are Republicans who swear journalists to secrecy and then admit they’d like to vote to reverse climate change. But they aren’t going to stick their necks out and risk getting BTU’d unless they think a bill can actually pass. “I have a hard time seeing major climate legislation with the razor-thin margins Democrats have in the Senate, and moderates already looking to the midterm elections,” Glassman said.
Wondering how close the world is to total annihilation, existential doom, and the collapse of life as we know it? Scientists have a new estimate for you.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been faithfully updating its signature “Doomsday Clock” since 1947. Every few years (or lately, every year), a group of scientists and security experts gets together to determine how close humanity is to “civilization-ending apocalypse.” They then set the “time” on the clock, as a way of letting the world know: The end, or “midnight,” is near.
This year, the Doomsday Clock is set to 100 seconds to midnight, tying last year as the most baleful warning the group has ever given. “As close to midnight as ever,” Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, said in a statement.
To be clear, the clock is not a literal clock. Instead, it’s a sort of a New York Times election needle for the planet, an anxiety-inducing egg timer that counts down the “minutes to midnight.” It has ticked back and forth from 17 minutes (phew) to less than 2 minutes (eek!) over the past several decades. The numbers don’t matter as much as what they are supposed to convey — that, with our nuclear weapons and carbon dioxide emissions and global pandemics and our increasingly dumb internet full of misinformation, the world is perilously close to catastrophe. (Climate change is a big reason why the group has moved the clock up in recent years.)
The problem is that there are a lot of these apocalyptic countdowns, and after a while, they all start to feel like background noise. The world was going to end in 2012, based on a popular misreading of the Mayan calendar — and then it didn’t. The year 2000 was going to cause large-scale electricity blackouts and computer failures in a Y2K apocalypse — and then it didn’t, thanks to the hard work of many computer programmers behind the scenes.
Climate activists have their own set of deadlines and apocalyptic predictions. In 2018, after the release of a landmark United Nations report on the overheating planet, Greta Thunberg began saying that humanity only had “12 years” to halt the destruction of global warming. There’s even a giant digital clock in Union Square counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until we have to totally stop burning fossil fuels — or face the consequences.
The intentions here are good: Deadlines can motivate people to get things done quickly, as every college student (and journalist) knows. If you hear the world is ending in a little over a decade, you might be motivated to protest in the streets against human extinction, or skip school to stage a sit-in. But dangling the apocalypse in front of the public over and over comes with a downside. Research shows that most people can only handle so much fear, devastation, and “the world is ending!” messaging before they tune out. And then there’s the problem of what happens when the allegedly catastrophic moment actually arrives. When 2030 (the most popular “climate deadline”) rolls around, my guess is that we’ll still be spewing some carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and, hopefully, human civilization will still be standing. At that point, will all of those “12 year” warnings feel like crying wolf?
The Doomsday Clock has a similar problem. As Lawrence Krauss, a former member of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, it’s hard to take the clock seriously when it has remained frighteningly close to the apocalypse for … over 70 years. (Humanity’s best showing was in 1991, when the bulletin announced that the Cold War was over and set the clock a relaxing 17 minutes to midnight.) As we’ve learned during the pandemic, people have trouble focusing on catastrophes for more than even a few weeks at a time; asking them to fixate on the potential demise of civilization for decades is a tall order.
One of the weirdest things about the Doomsday Clock in 2021 is that, after a year in which most people felt closer to the apocalypse than ever before — remember the Blade Runner-esque orange skies over San Francisco, the rioters storming the U.S. Capitol building, and the deadly virus decimating the world? — the clock didn’t budge a single second. (The Bulletin explained its decision in a statement, noting that “COVID-19 will not obliterate civilization.” Comforting.)
Since the invention of nuclear weapons — and, in a way, ever since people started digging up and burning fossil fuels for energy — humanity has been living under a knife edge. Our way of life could be upended by an asteroid strike, by trigger-happy heads of state with nuclear arsenals, or devastating climate “tipping points” that jolt the weather into a new, strange normal. But we don’t need a clock to tell us that: It’s simply a part of being human in an overheating, interconnected world. All the clock does is make us feel anxious, then disappointed, then anxious again, and finally — if you’re like me — a little bit bored.
The following is an excerpt from The First 100, a short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration. Sign up to get more of The First 100 in your inbox.
Hi, I’m Nathanael Johnson, and today is day 10 of the Biden administration. It’s been another week with another (bigger!) round of executive orders on climate change.
President Joe Biden is taking every opportunity he can to address climate change. His power is limited, though, because Biden alone can’t make laws — he can’t ban fracking, levy a carbon tax, or give everyone the money to put solar panels on their homes. But he has almost complete authority over the government bureaucracy, and when he tells that massive system to start using clean electricity and zero-emissions vehicles, as he did this week, it’s a big deal.
To give a sense of scale, the federal government employs four times as many people as the biggest U.S. corporation —Walmart. It provides 9 million jobs, and its employees aren’t all just pencil-pushers: Some of them, for example, fly fighter jets, burning a staggering amount of energy. The government uses about as much energy each year as all the solar panels in the country produce.
In order to put postal employees in electric trucks and Secret Service agents in e-limos, automakers are going to have to ramp up their production lines. There are 650,000 vehicles in the government fleet — twice the number of electric cars Americans bought in 2019.
As the government shifts its buying habits, the ripple effects will be real. Still, it’s important to remember that there’s always some distance between a mandate being made and it being followed. These things take a while. The government isn’t going to put in an order for half a million electric cars tomorrow; it’s going to replace them as they break down over the next decade — or until a new president takes office and reverses everything Biden just did.
But Wait … There’s More.
Biden signed far-reaching orders on climate change on Wednesday. He halted all oil and gas sales on public lands, told his agencies to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and called for a new Civilian Climate Corps — reprising the Depression-era program that put people to work planting trees, building trails, and protecting towns from wildfires.
Climate change is now central to foreign policy and national security. Biden asked federal workers to plan for future natural disasters, climate refugees, and resource wars. Finally, he said that the United States would set deeper emissions reductions targets under the Paris climate agreement.
The president set a goal of conserving 30 percent of U.S. land and oceans by 2030, and created a system to make agencies do all this in a way that redresses the injustice of those who have suffered from pollution, while providing new jobs to areas dominated by the fossil fuel industry.
President Joe Biden signed an order directing federal agencies to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels on Wednesday, amid a bonanza of climate-focused executive orders. “Unlike previous administrations,” he said at a press briefing, “I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil.”
Climate activists have been waiting to hear those words for years. Fossil fuel subsidies, they argue, keep oil and gas companies in business and help them spew planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The problem is that not everyone agrees on what counts as a fossil fuel subsidy and what doesn’t. Subsidies aren’t blank checks from the government: They usually take the form of tax breaks, regulatory loopholes, or anything else that gives a particular industry a leg up. The estimates for the U.S. run from around $20 billion to as much as $650 billion a year, if you think fossil fuel companies should be paying the government for all the damages from their pollution.
One of the best available analyses comes from the research and advocacy organization Oil Change International, which calculates that the federal government funnels a whopping $15 billion every year into the production of fossil fuels, thanks in part to the energetic efforts of fossil fuel lobbyists. (That doesn’t account for the $14.5 billion in subsidies to bring down gas prices and utility bills, making fossil fuels more affordable, or the roughly $2 billion spent investing in oil, gas, and coal projects overseas.)
But only a fraction of those subsidies are within Biden’s purview as president. A substantial portion of that $15 billion a year comes from tax breaks or other financial incentives that are set and managed by Congress, so getting rid of those would require passing legislation. “My understanding is that he’s going to essentially direct federal agencies to eliminate the subsidies that are under their control,” said Collin Rees, a senior campaigner at Oil Change International. That could amount to “a few billion dollars” a year, or around 20 percent of all federal subsidies for extracting and producing fossil fuels.
That’s why Biden’s order contains a key phrase: The government is only ordered to cut out subsidies “as consistent with applicable law.” The president can’t touch Congress’ fossil fuel budget, but there are a few places where federal agencies — like the Department of Justice or the Department of Energy — could make a huge difference.
First, the Biden administration could make sure that fossil fuel companies have to pay up when facing government penalties. In 2015, for instance, the Justice Department reached a settlement with BP over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, promising that the company would have to pay $20.8 billion in damages for leaking oil all over the Gulf of Mexico. But the settlement turned out to be tax-deductible, meaning that BP could write off $15.3 billion of the penalty. Under a Biden administration, the Justice Department could close that kind of loophole, Rees said.
The federal government also spends upwards of $700 million every year maintaining and constructing shipping lanes on rivers around the U.S., often for the transport of oil and coal. That, Rees says, could also be cut down if the Biden administration moves to eliminate support of fossil fuels. The government could also stop new low-cost leasing in publicly owned lands in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana, where coal companies are getting a big financial break on mining.
The biggest effect of Biden’s new order might not be the money itself. “The dollars at stake here are not going to hurt the industry,” said Andrew Logan, the senior director of oil and gas at Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit. While a few billion dollars looks big in the aggregate, spread across the entire U.S., it probably isn’t enough to hurt a particular company or project. But the executive order could damage the industry’s image. “What they really don’t want to do is become the next tobacco,” Logan said. Dwindling support for fossil fuels could lead banks and investors to steer clear of oil and gas companies in the future.
Rees says that environmental activists have pushed the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies from a niche cause to a voter demand. Last year, the Democratic National Committee faced backlash after quietly removing mention of oil and gas funding from its party platform. (At the time, Biden’s press secretary confirmed that the candidate still supported canceling government support for fossil fuels.)
Biden’s orders are also a big shift from the Obama years, when the name of the game was an “all of the above” energy strategy that didn’t specifically target fossil fuels. Now, pressured by activists, the federal government is much more openly hostile to oil and gas. As part of the same executive order on Wednesday, for example, Biden also promised that the U.S. would work to end international financing of fossil fuel projects. There’s “this increasing recognition that the fossil fuel industry is not our friend,” Rees said.
Four years ago, just hours after former President Donald Trump promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the governors of California, Washington, and New York announced the formation of the “U.S. Climate Alliance” — a group of states committed to following through on the country’s broken promises. “If the president is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavor,” Governor Jerry Brown of California said at the time, “then California and other states will step up.”
Today, the alliance boasts 24 states and one territory: Puerto Rico. All have vowed to collectively cut emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005 levels. Many have set ambitious goals to cover their states in wind turbines, electrify cars and trucks, and slash the amount of dangerous pollutants in the air. With President Joe Biden in the White House, and with the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement, hopes are high for action on the climate crisis. But the states’ struggles over the past four years demonstrate that it may be a long road ahead.
Most of the states that have promised sweeping emissions cuts by 2025 — which include the U.S. Climate Alliance members and the state of Louisiana — are still off-track to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris Agreement, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund released last month. The study, based on data from the research firm Rhodium Group, found that if the country recovers fairly quickly from COVID-19, U.S. emissions in those states would only fall 18 percent by 2025, missing the goal of cutting emissions by 26 percent.
That’s not really the states’ fault. Over the past four years, governors and state legislators have been swimming against the tide, trying to pass legislation and issuing executive orders even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the president openly worked to block their efforts.
“I would say that states are doing as well as they can, given the difficult circumstances,” said Jeff Mauk, executive director of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators. “They had a federal government that was hostile to their efforts to act on climate.”
The 25 states and territories in the U.S. Climate Alliance. Louisiana also has pledged to slash emissions in line with the agreement, but is not a member of the Alliance.Clayton Aldern / Grist
In California, for example, Trump’s EPA revoked the state’s authority to set its own emissions standards for cars — throwing the car industry into disarray and also endangering fuel-economy standards in 12 other states. And in late 2019, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the transmission of electricity and the transport of oil, released a controversial rule that made new renewables more expensive and boosted coal production in 13 states.
“It really just felt like they were doing everything they could to block the transition to renewable energy,” Mauk said.
But the Environmental Defense Fund’s analysis also shows the limits of current state policies, according to Pam Kiely, the organization’s senior director of regulatory strategy. States have put a lot of effort into cutting emissions from power generation — getting renewables onto the grid, for example, or phasing out the burning of coal. But electricity only accounts for around 28 percent of the country’s CO2 emissions; that leaves a lot for states to work on outside the grid — the emissions that come from cars, steelmaking, or central heating. “Broadly speaking, climate action at the state level has sort of equated to action in the electric power sector,” Kiely said. “But we’ve got a lot to do in the transportation sector, in the built environment, in the industrial sector, and beyond.”
Kiely also points out that while states have big goals to cut carbon emissions, they haven’t always been able to set strict limits on carbon dioxide pollution that ratchet down over time — which she sees as the key to cutting emissions. Some of that is the result of prolonged pushback from conservatives. In Oregon, Republican state senators fled the Capitol in 2019 rather than vote on a landmark bill to cap carbon emissions across the economy. And just a few weeks ago in Massachusetts, Republican Governor Charlie Baker vetoed a massive climate change bill over concern that some of its interim goals — like a requirement to cut emissions in half by 2030, compared to 1990 levels — would be too costly to achieve.
The U.S. Climate Alliance, meanwhile, has disputed some of the Environmental Defense Fund’s findings, arguing that the inclusion of Louisiana (which has committed to the Paris Agreement’s goals, but is not an official member of the alliance) lowers overall projections for how much emissions can be cut by 2025. The alliance’s own analysis, released at the end of 2019, projected that member states would slash emissions 20 to 27 percent by 2025 — potentially meeting that Paris target of 26 percent.
The group opted not to make a similar projection at the end of last year, because of uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic. While a quicker recovery could lead emissions to rebound, a slower economic recovery could get states much closer to their target, since recessions and pandemic-induced disasters tend to cut carbon emissions quickly.
Julie Cerqueira, the alliance’s executive director, said that without the group of states, the future of climate policy in the U.S. would look much darker. “If it wasn’t for these 25 states doing everything possible within their authority,” she said, “I think that we’d be starting from zero again.”
The alliance also notes that its member states have performed well in comparison to the states that didn’t commit to staying in the Paris Agreement. Between 2005 and 2018, states in the alliance cut their CO2 emissions by 14 percent; the other 26 states saw emissions fall by roughly 8 percent. These non-member states — which include oil-rich Texas, West Virginia, and Idaho — account for 60 percent of the country’s CO2 emissions. If they stay on their current course, their emissions could end up increasing over the next five to 10 years, according to a U.S. Climate Alliance report.
With the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement, Cerqueira says that alliance members are planning to continue their work during the Biden administration, partnering with the federal government instead of working against it. Representatives from member states have already met with Gina McCarthy, Biden’s new “climate czar,” to discuss future policies and plans.
Mauk, of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, expects states to expand their efforts to cut emissions during the Biden years. During the Obama administration, he argued, most policymakers hoped that Congress would pass sweeping legislation to take on climate change. Now, however, with only a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, governors and state legislators are unlikely to count on the federal government to solve all their climate problems. “People have learned the lessons from the last decade,” he said.
Four years ago, just hours after former President Donald Trump promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the governors of California, Washington, and New York announced the formation of the “U.S. Climate Alliance” — a group of states committed to following through on the country’s broken promises. “If the president is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavor,” Governor Jerry Brown of California said at the time, “then California and other states will step up.”
Today, the alliance boasts 24 states and one territory: Puerto Rico. All have vowed to collectively cut emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005 levels. Many have set ambitious goals to cover their states in wind turbines, electrify cars and trucks, and slash the amount of dangerous pollutants in the air. With President Joe Biden in the White House, and with the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement, hopes are high for action on the climate crisis. But the states’ struggles over the past four years demonstrate that it may be a long road ahead.
Most of the states that have promised sweeping emissions cuts by 2025 — which include the U.S. Climate Alliance members and the state of Louisiana — are still off-track to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris Agreement, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund released last month. The study, based on data from the research firm Rhodium Group, found that if the country recovers fairly quickly from COVID-19, U.S. emissions in those states would only fall 18 percent by 2025, missing the goal of cutting emissions by 26 percent.
That’s not really the states’ fault. Over the past four years, governors and state legislators have been swimming against the tide, trying to pass legislation and issuing executive orders even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the president openly worked to block their efforts.
“I would say that states are doing as well as they can, given the difficult circumstances,” said Jeff Mauk, executive director of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators. “They had a federal government that was hostile to their efforts to act on climate.”
The 25 states and territories in the U.S. Climate Alliance. Louisiana also has pledged to slash emissions in line with the agreement, but is not a member of the Alliance.Clayton Aldern / Grist
In California, for example, Trump’s EPA revoked the state’s authority to set its own emissions standards for cars — throwing the car industry into disarray and also endangering fuel-economy standards in 12 other states. And in late 2019, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the transmission of electricity and the transport of oil, released a controversial rule that made new renewables more expensive and boosted coal production in 13 states.
“It really just felt like they were doing everything they could to block the transition to renewable energy,” Mauk said.
But the Environmental Defense Fund’s analysis also shows the limits of current state policies, according to Pam Kiely, the organization’s senior director of regulatory strategy. States have put a lot of effort into cutting emissions from power generation — getting renewables onto the grid, for example, or phasing out the burning of coal. But electricity only accounts for around 28 percent of the country’s CO2 emissions; that leaves a lot for states to work on outside the grid — the emissions that come from cars, steelmaking, or central heating. “Broadly speaking, climate action at the state level has sort of equated to action in the electric power sector,” Kiely said. “But we’ve got a lot to do in the transportation sector, in the built environment, in the industrial sector, and beyond.”
Kiely also points out that while states have big goals to cut carbon emissions, they haven’t always been able to set strict limits on carbon dioxide pollution that ratchet down over time — which she sees as the key to cutting emissions. Some of that is the result of prolonged pushback from conservatives. In Oregon, Republican state senators fled the Capitol in 2019 rather than vote on a landmark bill to cap carbon emissions across the economy. And just a few weeks ago in Massachusetts, Republican Governor Charlie Baker vetoed a massive climate change bill over concern that some of its interim goals — like a requirement to cut emissions in half by 2030, compared to 1990 levels — would be too costly to achieve.
The U.S. Climate Alliance, meanwhile, has disputed some of the Environmental Defense Fund’s findings, arguing that the inclusion of Louisiana (which has committed to the Paris Agreement’s goals, but is not an official member of the alliance) lowers overall projections for how much emissions can be cut by 2025. The alliance’s own analysis, released at the end of 2019, projected that member states would slash emissions 20 to 27 percent by 2025 — potentially meeting that Paris target of 26 percent.
The group opted not to make a similar projection at the end of last year, because of uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic. While a quicker recovery could lead emissions to rebound, a slower economic recovery could get states much closer to their target, since recessions and pandemic-induced disasters tend to cut carbon emissions quickly.
Julie Cerqueira, the alliance’s executive director, said that without the group of states, the future of climate policy in the U.S. would look much darker. “If it wasn’t for these 25 states doing everything possible within their authority,” she said, “I think that we’d be starting from zero again.”
The alliance also notes that its member states have performed well in comparison to the states that didn’t commit to staying in the Paris Agreement. Between 2005 and 2018, states in the alliance cut their CO2 emissions by 14 percent; the other 26 states saw emissions fall by roughly 8 percent. These non-member states — which include oil-rich Texas, West Virginia, and Idaho — account for 60 percent of the country’s CO2 emissions. If they stay on their current course, their emissions could end up increasing over the next five to 10 years, according to a U.S. Climate Alliance report.
With the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement, Cerqueira says that alliance members are planning to continue their work during the Biden administration, partnering with the federal government instead of working against it. Representatives from member states have already met with Gina McCarthy, Biden’s new “climate czar,” to discuss future policies and plans.
Mauk, of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, expects states to expand their efforts to cut emissions during the Biden years. During the Obama administration, he argued, most policymakers hoped that Congress would pass sweeping legislation to take on climate change. Now, however, with only a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, governors and state legislators are unlikely to count on the federal government to solve all their climate problems. “People have learned the lessons from the last decade,” he said.
The United States is rejoining the Paris climate agreement, fulfilling one of President Joe Biden’s earliest campaign promises and generating sighs of relief around the world as governments struggle to keep the planet’s temperature from surging to even more dangerous levels.
On Wednesday, just five hours after his inauguration and amid a flurry of other presidential actions, President Joe Biden signed an executive order returning the U.S. to the landmark accord to slash carbon emissions. The move will be official in 30 days.
It’s been three and a half years since President Donald Trump first announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the Paris deal, and in some ways the rest of the world has moved on. Despite fears that it would set off a mass exodus, no other countries have exited the agreement, and many have even ratcheted up their carbon-cutting targets. China, once seen as the biggest obstacle to climate progress, has vowed to zero out its emissions by 2060; the United Kingdom, European Union, Japan, and Korea are aiming to cut emissions to zero even earlier, by 2050.
But without the U.S. on board, the central goal of the agreement — to prevent dangerous levels of global warming — would be virtually impossible. The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, and the U.S. is responsible for around 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, making it the second-largest polluter after China.
“President Biden has given America and the world a clear sign that his administration views climate change as an existential crisis,” Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.
Rejoining the agreement, however, is just the first step. To fulfill its obligations under the pact, the Biden administration will have to quickly throw together a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions before the next U.N. climate meeting, scheduled for December in Glasgow. Other countries will expect the U.S. to come with a goal to slash CO2 emissions by 45 to 50 percent by 2030 (compared to 2005 levels) and get overall emissions to zero by the middle of the century. And it won’t be enough for the United States just to set those targets. Biden will also have to show the country can reach them — and that it can be counted on not to back out for a second time.
“Even though the world is excited to welcome them back, it leaves a scar,” said Rachel Kyte, a former special representative for the United Nations and dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “In the back of people’s minds, it’s: ‘They walked away once. Could they walk away again?’”
The agreement, after all, was designed with a possible U.S. exit in mind. Diplomats, worried about a climate-denying stage in American politics, built in a four-year holding period for any country trying to leave the accord. That’s why, even though Trump said he would exit back in 2017, the U.S. couldn’t officially leave until this past November.
Still, the 189 countries that stayed in the agreement aren’t doing a great job at cutting their emissions either. According to the independent analysis group Climate Action Tracker, virtually every country in the world is off track when it comes to meeting the stated goals of the Paris Agreement. And even if countries do fulfill their current pledges, the planet is still on track to warm by about 3 degrees Celsius.
Kyte says that the U.S. rejoining could help address those gaps in global ambition. Over the past four years, the country’s absence “gave other countries permission not to be their best selves,” she said. Countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil were able to hide behind the U.S.’s failure and avoid scrutiny of their rising CO2 emissions. Now, with Biden stepping back into the action, “it takes the space away for these countries to skulk around the edges.”
Some of this has already begun. In Australia, experts are already worried that the government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison will be “isolated” if it continues to drag its feet on climate action. The incoming Biden administration has also promised to “name and shame” countries that don’t comply with global targets, calling them “climate outlaws.”
But for the U.S. to really apply pressure internationally, Biden is going to have to start passing some climate legislation at home. And, with the slimmest-possible majority in the Senate, the Biden administration faces a tough road ahead.
The first full estimates of the United States’ emissions last year are in, showing the greatest annual drop in greenhouse gases since World War II. The country’s emissions fell 10 percent, more than the 7 percent drop worldwide, according to the calculations of the Rhodium Group.
Thanks to this dramatic drop, U.S. emissions are down 21 percent from 2005 levels. That’s better than the country’s reduction target set by the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, but still behind on its pledge under the Paris Agreement to cut emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025. Some might be tempted to think of this plague year, when the spread of COVID-19 slowed global movement to a crawl, as giving the country a head start in meeting its targets. But reducing emissions through death and poverty is no way to solve the climate crisis — it’s both cruel and politically unviable.
“The enormous toll of economic damage and human suffering as a result of the pandemic is no cause for celebration,” wrote the authors of the new report from the Rhodium Group, an independent research provider that issues regular emissions estimates. “The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy.”
The drop is also expected to be temporary, with emissions rebounding once the pandemic recedes. Sure, economic hardship reduces pollution in the short term, but the country is going to have to adopt policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions during booms, not just busts.
Last year’s economic crash drove down emissions in every sector, but none more than transportation, where they fell almost 15 percent.
Many people simply stopped moving as the quarantine orders rolled out. At the peak of the lockdowns in April and May, Americans were buying 40 percent less gasoline compared to 2019 levels, and demand for jet fuel was down a whopping 68 percent. As pandemic fatigue set in, cars returned to the roads and planes to the sky. But even in October, Americans were still driving about 9 percent less than normal — perhaps because they were still skipping their old commutes or limiting non-essential travel.
The pandemic didn’t stop the ongoing transformation of the country’s electrical system. Power plant emissions dropped 10 percent last year, driven largely by a 19 percent drop in carbon dioxide released by coal generation as the industry continues its death spiral. Natural gas and renewable energy rose in response, and the increase in gas-burning muted the greenhouse gas savings from shutting down coal plants.
Industrial emissions dropped at the beginning of the pandemic, but then bounced back. This year, industry could become the second-largest source of greenhouse gases after transportation, according to the Rhodium report. For years, climate wonks focused on electrical generation because it was the dominant source of pollutants. Now, it’s likely to fall into third place.
Add it all up, and it looks like the United States is now emitting less warming gases than it did in 1990. But remember, this is an early estimate, counting the most readily available data points. The report did not include emissions from agriculture, forestry, and land-use change. That means it didn’t factor in the massive fires that raged across the West last year. One estimate suggested that California fires generated 91 million tons of carbon dioxide. For comparison, this new report says power-sector emissions fell by 167 million tons.
And expect a big rebound in emissions as people get their vaccinations and the economy recovers. The fact that emissions zigged down as 8 million Americans fell into poverty and 375,000 died from COVID-19 is nothing to be proud of. Rebuilding an economy that runs clean and prosperously — now, that would be an accomplishment.
For decades, the potential for a nuclear catastrophe felt like a waking threat, just around the corner. Then, in 1968, many of the nations once responsible for pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war collectively agreed to reverse course, signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Member nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to end the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and eventually move toward full disarmament. While it didn’t end the threat of nuclear weapons overnight, this framework helped set in motion a new era. Today, the global arsenal of nuclear weapons is a fifth of what it was during the height of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s.
Half a century later, the nations once stockpiling nuclear weapons are now stockpiling fossil fuels, which are already upending life on earth as we know it. That’s why a group of activists, policy experts, and academics are beginning to push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, modeled off its predecessor on nuclear weapons. Both treaties are rooted in the idea that “there are certain technologies and certain substances that pose such a global risk to humanity that we have an obligation to address that risk together,” explained Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law. Muffett is on the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, which officially launched last September.
In mid-December, the New York City Council held a virtual hearing to consider endorsing a resolution for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. It could become the second city in the world to do so, following Vancouver, Canada — assuming another city doesn’t get there first. The Los Angeles City Council is poised to endorse the treaty, and Barcelona, Spain has also introduced a similar resolution. By adopting the treaty, cities could build momentum for a multinational agreement to wind down the dangerous production of fossil fuels — not just curbing emissions — in a similar approach to the global disarmament of nuclear weapons.
“New fossil fuel projects are coming online, even as the world already has more fossil fuels developed than it can possibly extract while staying below 1.5 degrees,” said Muffett. “And so the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty emerged from the recognition that the world is facing a threat of truly global, historical proportion.”
The treaty calls for a fossil fuel phaseout to happen in three key ways: 1) non-proliferation, where countries end the expansion and exploration of fossil fuel production; 2) global disarmament, where there’s a phasing out of existing fossil fuel stockpiles, such as decommissioning old fossil fuel infrastructure and removing subsidies; and 3) a peaceful, just transition to renewable and low-carbon energy.
It is envisioned as a complement to the Paris climate accord, which commits to limiting the global average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). The landmark agreement sets to achieve these goals largely through greenhouse gas emissions cuts, without putting the onus on countries to curb the production of fossil fuels — even though fossil fuel use is the world’s primary source of carbon dioxide emissions.
“I was absolutely shocked the first time I sat down and went through the Paris accord and searched for the words ‘oil,’ ‘gas,’ ‘coal,’ and ‘fossil fuels.’ They don’t exist,” said Tzeporah Berman, a long-time Canadian activist who is the international program director at Stand.Earth, and also a member of the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative.
This omission is discussed in the recent production gap report, a collaboration between research institutions and the U.N. Environment Program, which highlights the discrepancy between countries’ climate commitments and the ongoing production of fossil fuels. Last year’s report, released in December, found that in order to keep the world below 1.5 degrees C of additional warming, countries will need to decrease fossil fuel production by 6 percent every year, adding up to a 60 percent drop in production over the next decade. And even though fossil fuel production was curbed by 7 percent in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the report warns that “countries are still planning to produce far more fossil fuels by 2030.”
Berman points out that this gap isn’t solely the failure of the Paris accord — many climate laws and policies consistently overlook the supply side of the equation. “I mean, look at even our climate champions — California, Canada, Norway — they’re all in fossil fuel production at this moment in history,” said Berman. Despite aggressive emissions goals, all of these governments continue to build new fossil fuel infrastructure, investing more deeply in the substance they have pledged to nearly eliminate from the economy.
“The theory of climate policy for 30 years since Kyoto has been that if we can reduce demand for fossil fuels and increase the price of carbon, that the markets itself will constrain production,” said Bergman. “That’s not happening fast enough. And the markets are distorted today by governments continuing to increase subsidies to the fossil fuel industry: billions and billions of dollars.”
Most recently, the majority of energy-related stimulus spending money by G20 nations has been invested in fossil fuels, continuing to lock in dangerous levels of emissions. “As of November 2020, G20 governments had committed USD 233 billion to activities that support fossil fuel production and consumption,” the production gap report states. That’s compared to only $146 billion invested in renewable energy by G20 nations. By explicitly addressing the supply side of the climate crisis, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty offers a way for countries to shift course.
The ultimate goal is for the treaty to become a multinational, cooperative agreement in which wealthier nations with the longest histories of fossil fuel production can be the first movers. Meena Raman, who is based in Malaysia and leads the climate program for the international advocacy organization Third World Network, notes that it’s especially important for this global framework to facilitate a just transition to clean energy. “It’s really about assisting developing countries to move in that direction that needs to happen, and for developed countries to stop it, phase out, and power down,” said Raman.
The United States, the largest oil and gas producer in the world, is in a position to become a first mover. As President-elect Joe Biden moves to rejoin the Paris Agreement — which the United States officially left in November — he will also have an opportunity to put the country on a pathway to phasing out fossil fuels. There’s a lot that the Biden administration could do to this end, Muffett said, including directing the Department of Interior to halt fossil fuel lease sales and permitting, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to develop more stringent greenhouse gas emissions rules, and reinstating the crude oil import ban.
Assuming Congress could get on board, the United States could also pass its own resolution to facilitate a national phaseout of fossil fuel production as a precursor to a multinational treaty. Until then, states and cities can play a crucial role, just as they did in passing resolutions building upon the 1968 treaty to encourage further negotiation and steps toward disarmament — a history that Muffett reminded New York City councilmembers of last month.
“In 1979, faced with the existential threat of nuclear weapons, New York City took a stand and called on the U.S. and other nations to end the escalating nuclear arms race that threatened humanity with nuclear annihilation,” said Muffett. “New York has the opportunity and the urgent responsibility to show that same leadership today.”
Data centers — cavernous warehouses filled with computers and cables that keep websites and apps running around the clock — are the beating heart of the internet. They are also huge consumers of energy, and as the world spends more time online, environmentalists are growing increasingly concerned about their climate impact. But Google is now trying to rehabilitate the data center’s image, by turning one of its giant server farms into a big battery.
Last month, Google announced that it would be installing batteries to replace some of the diesel generators that provide backup power at its data center in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium — a first for the company. The move is more than a routine upgrade from old, dirty equipment to new, cleaner technology. When Google isn’t using the batteries, it plans to supply some of their energy to the local electric grid. If the experiment is successful, data centers equipped with batteries that store renewably generated power could one day become “critical components in carbon-free energy systems,” Joe Kava, vice president of global data centers at Google, wrote in a blog post.
Data centers account for about 1 percent of global electricity usage, a figure that could rise as data-intensive activities like video streaming and cloud gaming become more popular and as more people around the world gain access to the internet. When data centers are powered with fossil fuel energy like coal and natural gas, these facilities can have a serious climate impact. As environmental groups started calling out Big Tech for all of this unseen pollution, image-conscious companies like Google and Microsoft began making an effort to clean up their data centers’ power supplies.
Today, Google is purchasing renewable energy credits to match its data center energy consumption, and by 2030, the company plans to be running all of its operations on carbon-free power all the time. But that will mean doing something about its diesel generators, which kick on to keep the internet running if the electrical grid experiences an outage. Google declined to say how frequently its diesel generators operate, or how much of its overall carbon footprint they account for. But the company estimates that worldwide, there are more than 20 gigawatts of diesel generating capacity in service across the data center industry, which is the equivalent of nearly 63 million solar photovoltaic panels — enough to power more than 833,000 homes for a month.
Now Google is going to test-drive a lithium-ion alternative. By the third quarter of 2021, the company told Grist, the Saint-Ghislain data center will be outfitted with a battery system that can supply three megawatts of power over two hours. That is likely a small fraction of the data center’s overall power needs — it’s not uncommon for hyperscale data centers to have upwards of 40 megawatts of backup power capacity installed — and Google will still have generators on site and ready to fire up in tandem if needed, according to GreenTechMedia.
But batteries aren’t just a one-trick pony. And when Google isn’t using them as a supplementary power source, their energy can be discharged into the grid. Grid operators around the world are in the process of installing more backup batteries to supply clean energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, and Sarah Smith, a senior scientific engineering associate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, felt that data centers offered a great opportunity for the tech industry to contribute to this effort.
“Data centers are a great example of where the need for reliable power is so high that they would be willing to install batteries,” Smith said. “But then that adds a lot of capacity that can serve other purposes.” Batteries, Smith said, can also help with “frequency regulation,” or maintaining a balance between how much power is being fed into the grid and how much power is being consumed, which is required for grids to run smoothly.
Gary Cook, the global climate campaigns director at the environmental advocacy organization Stand.Earth, said that the “potential is definitely there” for data centers to serve as big batteries. “In principle, yes, you can definitely sync these up in a way where they can be dispatchable to the grid and help meet the peaks of the supply curve where you have less renewable generation,” he said.
But Cook warned that simply installing batteries doesn’t necessarily make the grid greener, since they can just as easily be used to store and discharge electricity generated by a coal-fired power plant. While the Saint-Ghislain data center hosts an on-site solar farm, the new backup batteries will be charged from the grid. “As we scale across different sites and applications, different charging strategies will be possible,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email.
Peter Garraghan, a lecturer at Lancaster University who studies cloud computing, noted that companies like Google that have the resources and public relations incentive to experiment with new clean energy technologies only own a fraction of the data centers out there. Many more are run by smaller companies for which installing large amounts of backup battery capacity remains cost-prohibitive. “It’s more of an economic problem than a technical problem,” Garraghan said.
Still, as the cost of energy storage batteries continues to drop, more and more data center operators are likely to take an interest in the technology. After all, a key responsibility of data center operators is to ensure the internet never goes dark. Perhaps, Big Tech’s quest to uphold that responsibility will help keep everyone else’s lights on, too.
In 2014, Burlington, Vermont, the birthplace of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and the stomping grounds of Senator Bernie Sanders, announced that it had reached an energy milestone. The city of 42,000, which hugs the shore of Lake Champlain, produced enough power from renewable sources to cover all its electricity needs. Burlington, the city government proclaimed, was one of America’s first “renewable cities.”
Since then, Burlington has been joined by Georgetown, Texas, Aspen, Colorado, and a few other small towns across the country. And though some cities have a head start — Burlington benefits from a huge amount of hydroelectric power and ample wood for biomass burning — many that rely on fossil fuels for power are joining in. Today, more than 170 cities and towns across the U.S. have promised to shift their power supply from coal and natural gas to solar, wind, and hydropower. St. Louis, which currently gets only 11 percent of its power from renewables, says that it will run purely on renewables by 2035; coal-dependent Denver has promised to do the same by 2030.
“Cities are setting these goals and striving to go from a very small percentage of renewables to 100 percent on an extremely ambitious timeline,” said Lacey Shaver, city renewable energy manager at the World Resources Institute, via email. “It’s an exciting time for city energy work.”
But are 100 percent renewable cities actually … 100 percent renewable? The reality is a bit complicated — and it shows the challenges of true, “deep” decarbonization of electricity in the United States.
First, shifting to clean electricity doesn’t mean that a city zeroes out its carbon footprint — residents could still be driving gas-guzzling cars or heating their homes with natural gas. Even most claims of running on “clean” electricity come with caveats: What cities actually mean is that they purchase enough electricity from wind, solar, or other clean sources to balance out the power that they use over the course of the year. For places filled with renewables, like Vermont, that’s not such a big deal. But in other areas, a city might not be using all renewable electricity in real-time. Even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, electrons still need to be flowing through the grid to keep the lights on. And at the moment, a lot of that more consistent energy comes from non-renewable sources, mainly natural gas and coal.
“There’s really no city that operates as an island in electricity,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. “You’re going to be connected to a larger grid.” There’s no such thing as “fossil fuel electrons” and “renewable electrons” — all power mixes together once it reaches the grid. That means even a 100 percent renewable town might, from time to time, be sourcing its electricity from fossil fuels. Because of this, Rhodes says that goals to run purely on renewables are more like accounting mechanisms than a pure description of a city’s energy sources.
At the moment, this isn’t a big problem: Most cities have a long way to go even to get to that stage. The U.S. electricity grid is still over 60 percent powered by fossil fuels, and most cities get only around 15 percent of their power from renewables. When municipal governments buy renewable energy — even if they are still hooked into the larger grid — they add to the demand for wind and solar installations. But in the long run, experts say that this strategy is not going to get the country entirely off fossil fuels.
When cities manage this kind of renewable-energy balancing act, they’re “disconnecting something that is super important,” said Nestor Sepulveda, an associate at McKinsey and the author of an influential paper on decarbonizing the electricity grid. “You lose chronology — when energy is being produced and consumed.” Renewables like wind and solar are only available at certain times of the day, but a truly “clean” grid would have carbon-free sources of electricity ready to go at all times.
Local governments haven’t yet tried to meet this much higher bar, and it’s hard to blame them. A lot of the technologies required for clean, round-the-clock electricity aren’t quite ready yet. According to Jesse Jenkins, professor of engineering at Princeton University, that could include giant batteries, nuclear and geothermal energy, as well as hydrogen fuel and maybe even natural gas combined with carbon capture.
But these energy sources are either not ready for widespread use or are so expensive that they are cost-prohibitive. “They’re really not ready to scale,” Jenkins said. If the U.S. is serious about zeroing out emissions, he added, “we need to spend the next decade very proactively — pushing these technologies forward and seeing which ones succeed, how quickly they mature, and how fast we can scale them up in the future.”
There are some promising signs. During his campaign, President-elect Joe Biden promised to eliminate all emissions from the electricity grid by 2035 — a tall order, but one that is technically possible with huge investments in clean energy. And even if Biden is partly stymied by a divided Congress, he may be able to work with Republicans to boost research and development into the technologies needed to green the grid.
“Renewables have had great progress over the past decade,” Sepulveda said. “And that’s great.” But total decarbonization will require clean energy other than solar and wind, he added. The question is who’s going to come up with it — and if it will be soon enough.
Hello, I’m Nathanael Johnson, and today is Day 45 of the Biden administration. This week, legislators unveiled a bill that aims to fulfill some of Biden’s biggest campaign promises.
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