Category: Energy

March 26, 2025

Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping project
Scattered across the United States, hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines scar the earth, posing a safety hazard to passing hikers and a health risk to nearby communities. But cached inside piles of refuse and ponds of toxic waste, there are also elements as critical for the 21st-century economy as coal was for the industrial revolution. Now, an obscure federal government program known as the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI, is identifying the high-tech minerals concealed in these mines — as well as those hidden beneath the Earth’s surface.

Developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, during the first Trump administration, Earth MRI aims to comprehensively map the nation’s underground deposits of “critical minerals” — an ever-growing list of elements and compounds considered vital for national security and the economy. In 2021, Earth MRI received a massive funding boost through the bipartisan infrastructure law, accelerating federal scientists’ efforts to figure out which parts of the country are rich in minerals used in clean energy technologies, semiconductors, and high-tech weaponry. While the Trump administration has moved aggressively to reverse most of former President Joe Biden’s climate policies, it appears to agree with the prior administration’s desire to locate — and, eventually, mine — more of these resources.

Many Biden-era climate and energy initiatives remain in limbo following the Trump administration’s freeze on the disbursement of grant funding and mass firing of federal employees — but Earth MRI got an early greenlight to resume operations.

“This is a program that has survived both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Peter Cook, a critical minerals policy expert at The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental solutions research organization, told Grist. “They’re both definitely interested in critical minerals.”

An Earth MRI map showing data collected by the program.
USGS

Minerals like lithium, graphite, and the group of 17 metallic elements known as rare earths are essential for a wide range of technologies, including those at the heart of the clean energy transition. The lithium-ion batteries that store renewable energy and power EVs can contain lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and more. Electric vehicle motors and some wind turbine generators contain magnets that require the rare earth element neodymium, and often smaller amounts of dysprosium and terbium. Certain solar panels require gallium, germanium, indium, and tellurium. The clean energy sector’s appetite for these metals is expected to surge as the energy transition accelerates: A recent report by The Breakthrough Institute found that EVs alone may account for two-thirds of future national demand of many key minerals. At the same time, critical minerals are vital for high-tech military technologies, advanced semiconductors, and more.

Despite these diverse needs, U.S. output of many minerals is limited. A 2020 report by the Commerce Department found that of an initial list of 35 critical minerals, America’s supply of 31 of them came mostly or entirely from foreign sources. Production of many critical minerals is dominated by China, which is engaged in a trade war with the United States that has involved tariffs and export restrictions on several metals. For some particularly scarce metals like gallium, used in advanced semiconductors, the U.S. has no domestic production at all.

While Biden saw domestic mineral supply chains as a key pillar of a U.S. clean energy manufacturing economy, Donald Trump’s interest in critical minerals appears more related to their military uses and national security implications. That interest can be seen in everything from a foreign policy focused on mining deals to a domestic agenda that includes cutting bureaucratic red tape to fuel additional mineral extraction. While Earth MRI hasn’t garnered the same level of attention as, say, Trump’s desire to buy Greenland for its rare earth resources or bargain with Ukraine for its minerals in exchange for military aid, the existence of the program reflects a long-standing focus on shoring up U.S. mineral supplies.

The USGS established Earth MRI in 2019, following a Trump executive order that called on federal agencies to address vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical mineral supply chains. Initially, the program had a modest annual budget of about $11 million, which USGS scientists, in partnership with state geological surveys around the country, used to launch a national critical minerals mapping campaign that included a mix of airborne surveys and on-the-ground fieldwork. But the bipartisan infrastructure law, or BIL, allowed Earth MRI to kick into overdrive, with a $320 million funding boost spread over five years. In 2022, the program’s yearly budget jumped to $75 million, a level at which it will remain through 2026.

“We’re transforming the data landscape, and we’re transforming it in a big and consistent way through the sustained funding,” Earth MRI science coordinator Jamey Jones told Grist in an interview.
Explore more stories in this issue

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds

Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?
Earth MRI’s recent list of achievements is impressive.

When the BIL passed into law in late 2021, scientists had collected high-quality geophysical data across only about 10 percent of the United States; by late 2024, that figure had jumped to nearly 25 percent. In the past two years alone, Jones said, Earth MRI scientists have conducted airborne magnetic surveys — which measure variations in Earth’s magnetic field to detect different subsurface rock types and identify features like faults — across an area twice the size of Montana. Late last year, Earth MRI and NASA completed the world’s largest high-quality hyperspectral survey over California, Nevada, and Arizona. Hyperspectral surveys, which measure reflected sunlight outside the range of human vision, can be used in arid regions to produce detailed mineral maps of the Earth’s surface. This year and next, NASA and Earth MRI will expand the survey to include parts of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Oregon.

In addition to mapping minerals still in the ground, Earth MRI is taking a closer look at ones that have already been extracted. In 2023, the program’s scientists accelerated their efforts to explore the critical mineral content of mine waste located in tailings ponds and rock piles around the country. Mine waste is considered a potentially valuable source of many important metals and minerals, but they have never been systematically studied. Thanks to BIL funding, Jones says that the USGS recently completed the first-ever comprehensive national inventory of abandoned mine lands, which it anticipates publishing later this year. In partnership with state geological surveys, Earth MRI is now in the process of dispatching researchers to abandoned mine sites to collect samples of waste rock that can be analyzed in the lab to assess their critical mineral content. “Eventually, we hope to produce a national assessment of critical mineral resources in mine waste,” Jones said.

A helicopter carries an airborne electromagnetic induction sensor over parts of northeastern Wisconsin for a USGS study in January 2021.
USGS / Wisconsin Dept. of Agricultural, Trade, and Consumer Protection; Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources / Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey

The data Earth MRI is collecting does not indicate which exact spots in the ground are the most attractive to mine. Rather, it supplies just enough information “to attract the private sector into an area” to conduct more detailed exploratory work, said Simon Jowitt, who directs the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and is Earth MRI’s primary point of contact for the state. The effort involved in collecting this preliminary, or “pre-competitive,” data often has an outsized economic benefit, Jowitt says. Research in other countries shows that for every dollar governments spend on it, tens to hundreds of dollars are returned to the economy through private investment in exploration and mining.

“If we want to have more mineral exploration, more secure domestic supply chains of metals and minerals, then we need to have these data,” Jowitt added.

Mining proposals often attract intense public opposition, due to fears about damage to ecosystems and water supplies. But both Trump and Biden — as well as members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — appear to support more of it. While it’s still too early to say how much of an impact Earth MRI will have on domestic mining — it often takes a decade or more to permit or build a mine even after all the exploratory work is complete — there are signs that private industry is taking a keen interest in its data. For instance, Jones said an exploration company in Nevada told the agency that it has discovered new lithium deposits based on geochemical data Earth MRI released.

Even as Trump has sought to kneecap other federal agencies and projects, funding for Earth MRI never appeared to be in serious jeopardy. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that called for “terminating the Green New Deal” by pausing the disbursement of all funds appropriated through the BIL and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — a move that multiple judges have found to be illegal. But the same order directed the interior secretary to “prioritize efforts to accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States, with a focus on locating previously unknown deposits of critical minerals.”

“I think it was pretty quickly recognized that the priorities [of the order] would outweigh the freeze,” Jones said. After a four-week pause, the Trump administration restored Earth MRI’s funding on February 18. And this month, Trump issued another executive order calling for agency heads to identify “as many sites as possible” on federal land that may be suitable for critical minerals mining and invoking the Defense Production Act to accelerate mineral development.

Slabs of lithium boron found beneath Esmeralda County, Nevada. Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

While the mapping program is moving full steam ahead for now, it remains to be seen what will become of it once BIL funding sunsets after 2026. Barring an additional infusion of cash from Congress, Jones says the most likely scenario is that the program’s budget will return to its pre-2022 baseline of about $11 million a year — a roughly 75 percent cut.

Jowitt, the Nevada state geologist, says he’d “like to be optimistic” that Congress will authorize additional funds for Earth MRI so that scientists can continue to fill in the gaps in the nation’s geologic maps. But considering the Trump administration’s recent efforts to dramatically shrink federal spending, he isn’t sure what will happen.

One thing is clear: There will be more work left to do after the BIL coffers are emptied. By 2027, “we can tell you exactly how much [geological data] coverage will have increased in the country for all of our different techniques,” Jones said. “And none of those numbers add up to 100 percent. Our job will not be complete.”

Read the full mining issue

A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future

Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?

The energy transition could turn Greenland into a mining mecca. Would it be for better or for worse?

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: the $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

Tradeoffs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?

Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping projecty

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds

In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping project on Mar 26, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 26, 2025

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?
Mining — whether for fossil fuels or, increasingly, the critical minerals in high demand today — has a long history of perpetuating violence against Indigenous people. Forcibly removing tribal communities to get to natural resources tied to their homelands has been the rule, not the exception, for centuries.

Today, more than half of the mineral deposits needed for a global energy transition — including lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel to make things like batteries and solar panels — are found near or beneath Indigenous lands.

In 2007, the United Nations adopted a resolution called the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that included the right to free, prior, and informed consent to the use of their lands, a concept known as FPIC. This principle protects Indigenous peoples from being forcibly relocated, provides suitable avenues for redress of past injustices, and gives tribes and communities the right to consent to — and the right to refuse — extractive industry projects like mining.
Explore more stories in this issue

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: The $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed
There’s a lot at stake: When followed, FPIC promises a process that gives Indigenous peoples a voice in how their homelands are used, as well as the right to say no to development altogether. And when it’s not, which is the vast majority of the time, tribal communities are further disenfranchised, facing violence and forced relocation as their sovereignty and rights are ignored.

There are an estimated 5,000 tribal communities around the world, encompassing roughly 476 million people across 90 countries, according to the U.N. Different tribes have different opinions on mining, but rarely is their legal right to refuse extraction projects recognized, even under the 2007 declaration.

Grist talked with five experts to better understand what free, prior, and informed consent should look like in this new era of mineral extraction. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Kate Finn, Osage, founder and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute

Originally an attorney, Finn now works with tribal communities and those in the mining industry to better implement FPIC. The Tallgrass Institute provides training and resources about the importance of tribal sovereignty.

Through one of our close partnerships, the SIRGE Coalition, we published an FPIC guide for Indigenous leaders. The goal of this resource is to provide information for Indigenous leaders who want to start putting together their own protocols for FPIC. I get to see a lot of innovation in this way from my desk and in my role as leading a global nongovernmental organization. But I know Indigenous leaders are always looking for what others are doing and what is working and what isn’t, so our best hope is that this guide helps provide information to build knowledge.

With investors, we provide resources and tools that not only help them to understand the breadth and depth of Indigenous peoples’ expertise and knowledge, but also to implement rights-based engagements. This is exactly what we want with our Free, Prior and Informed Consent Due Diligence questionnaire. This tool helps investors parse all the ways and steps that lead to a better engagement with Indigenous peoples.

What is FPIC?
Free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC, reflects Indigenous peoples’ right to give or withhold consent on anything that affects their lands or resources. FPIC is embedded in the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, requiring the 147 countries that signed it to make laws that give it legal standing.

However, implementation is often left to corporations and government agencies, and there are major power imbalances and policies that can derail negotiations between tribes, governments, and investors.
How can I advocate for FPIC?

1) Indigenous peoples are protected groups with rights that protect land and its original inhabitants through documents like treaties. Familiarize yourself with those that affect your area, and advocate for tribal consent and self-determination.
2) Learn as much as you can about FPIC and talk directly to community leaders about developing a plan to have in place if a mining project is proposed on or near your land.

3) State and federal agencies have differing policies based on tribal consultation, so the burden of communication lies largely with tribes. Because tribes can create their own policies around FPIC, talk to community leaders about what that process looks like.
4) Learn the names of international, large-scale mining companies that might be operating in your area, such as Solaris Resources, Rio Tinto, Vale S.A., and Glencore.

5) When possible, build relationships with other communities protected by FPIC that have fought against mines around the world, so that you can learn from them and share strategies.
Where can I find more information?

1) Securing Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Self-Determination: A Guide on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is a 60-page illustrated guide, coproduced by the SIRGE Coalition, for Indigenous leaders looking for ways to engage on a project that impacts them.

2) The Free, Prior, and Informed Consent Due Diligence questionnaire, created by the Tallgrass Institute, provides a list of considerations for investors seeking to implement best practices around Indigenous rights when developing resources.

3) The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, outlines a framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of Indigenous peoples of the world.

There is a lot of opportunity in this area. Shareholder engagement provides a pathway for Indigenous peoples to join collaboratively with allied investors to shift corporate behavior in a way that is aligned with Indigenous peoples’ priorities and self-determined goals. This can be a critical and necessary strategy when countries’ substandard policies allow corporations to operate with impacts to Indigenous peoples, whether operating in their own jurisdictions or internationally.

One powerful memory is a shareholder training we did with Indigenous youth at the U.N. Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples in 2024. We asked a room full of young people — all new to the idea of speaking to a shareholder or to the heads of a corporation — to craft a three-minute presentation that conveyed the priorities and concerns of their communities. The enthusiasm, readiness, eloquence, and precision that these young leaders brought to the exercise was breathtaking. It gave me delight and inspiration to witness future leadership in this field, and it opened my eyes to the potential for a generational approach to shareholder advocacy.

Richard Luarkie, Laguna of Pueblo, director of the Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty Initiative

Luarkie works to give tribes interested in pursuing mining opportunities the power to leverage their resources while asserting themselves as sovereign nations.

In 1952, our tribe entered into mining uranium. I read back on some of those council minutes, and it was very interesting because the discussion was about: “How do we do this? How do we provide for our people in the best way that we can?” We went from a few hundred thousand dollars in our bank account in the early ’50s to having millions at the end of the ’50s. Leapfrog to the late ’80s, and when I started college my bachelor’s was paid for with a scholarship — mining paid for my education.

I see all this need for critical minerals. The U.S. Department of Interior manages 55 million acres of surface land for tribes, and 57 million acres of subsurface minerals for tribes. Yet we are the poorest people in the country.

We need to go from sovereignty to significance. That’s how nations behave. We need to be significant. I believe that energy — because of the vast amount that is on or near our tribal lands across the country — is going to catapult us to significance.

I think our role is going to be bringing those tribes that have an interest, or curiosity, to engage in discussions. It’s not going to be all 574 tribes in the U.S., but I bet you if we could get 10 that’s going to be pretty big. They are going to be multibillion-dollar tribes. Those are going to be your sovereigns.

Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel at Earthworks

Mintzes looks at federal hard rock mining policy to advocate for better protections for the environment and tribes.

There are sales pitches from mining companies saying, “We’ll give you a job, and we’ll buy you a school, and we’ll build some roads and provide some infrastructure.” I’m not denying those things happen. But there is a difference between earning consent from a community — because you’ve shaped the mine operation in the way that meets their needs and shares revenue and benefits — versus just saying, “I’m giving you a benefit, take it or leave it.”

Mining companies may put up money upfront for some kind of security or financial assurance for when they need to clean up after a mine closes. The Interior Department keeps those bonds, and they are supposed to be sufficient, but they rarely are in our experience. We can point to examples of so-called modern mines that have been permitted under current rules, with current bonding levels. The mine goes belly-up and is unable to pay to clean things up.

The bonds that are insufficient, I think of them as glorified dirt-moving bonding money to pay for the recontouring of a slope or planting some grass. The bonds you really need to care about are the “shit just hit the fan” bond: A climate change event we weren’t expecting. There is a flood or hurricane. Fires. A dam bursts. We need sufficient bonds for that. There are ways to do it, we just need governments to hold companies accountable.

Recently, the U.S. launched our nation’s first-ever fund for cleaning up abandoned hard rock mines — but there’s only $5 million that’s been appropriated for that every year since 2022. That’s not nearly enough. The total liabilities are about $50 billion.

Fermina Stevens, Western Shoshone, executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project

Stevens and the Western Shoshone Defense Project have fought against deceptive mining development for decades in Nevada by promoting tribal jurisdiction over lands granted by an 1863 treaty.

The Western Shoshone Defense Project has been up and going since the early ’90s, so we’re a little over 30 years in of trying to protect our treaty territory. We’ve been dealing with gold extraction, and just trying to bring light to the harm that it causes the land and water.

Recently, we’ve been working to understand lithium and the green energy transition. We do a lot of international work regarding our unceded treaty. The United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination did a 10-year review of our case and determined that our [the Western Shoshone’s] human rights were violated in the so-called taking of our land through gradual encroachment. Those violations are where we make our stance, but the United States has basically ignored all that.

Doing this work, we’ve come to the conclusion there are no laws that really protect the things that are important: land, air, water, sun. The laws are written to give corporations the go-ahead to do whatever they choose. Free, prior, and informed consent is something that we’ve been screaming. In my view, [the United States] thumbs its nose at international law.

Dov Korff-Korn, legal director at Sacred Defense Fund

The Sacred Defense Fund’s mission is to promote Indigenous sovereignty and fight for environmental justice for tribes.

It’s important to start with the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and FPIC, because it shows that tribal nations in the U.S. are separate nations. Non-Native people have been colonized to think that that is untrue. We’re supposed to think of tribes like people practicing their culture, but not like they have legal or jurisdictional authority. We know they do. The [U.S.] Constitution says so. It’s been upheld numerous times, over 200 years of Supreme Court precedent that tribes have legal authority and jurisdiction over their lands.

But the question then becomes: What are tribal lands? Dispossession and colonization reduced tribal lands from vast areas of territory. About 90 percent of extraction is happening within 30 miles of reservations, and what these corporations do is they know exactly where tribal jurisdiction ends. So tribes have to look to other laws that don’t really regard tribal sovereignty on lands held or owned by a tribe, but pertain to cultural resources or artifacts, where then there’s a whole other realm of questions that come up.

Like in northern Nevada, where lithium and other heavy metals are needed for the renewable energy transition, the mines are being built adjacent to tribal lands. So even if they are going to impact the air and water, it’s very hard for tribes to step up when tribes are underresourced.

Read the full mining issue

A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future

Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?

The energy transition could turn Greenland into a mining mecca. Would it be for better or for worse?

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: the $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

Tradeoffs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?

Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping projecty

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds

In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty? on Mar 26, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 26, 2025

Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?
As renewable energy gathers steam around the world, the harms of mining its mineral components continue to grow. On the environmental front, for example, there’s the destruction of Indonesian rainforests to mine nickel and the draining of precious South American groundwater reserves to obtain lithium. There’s also the human toll, which can be seen in forced displacement and child labor exploitation in the cobalt-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as violence toward Indigenous people living on nickel-studded lands in the Philippines.

The devastation raises the question: Is the world better off just sticking with the status quo? With these factors, is renewable energy and clean technology any better than fossil fuels?

Whatever the answer, the comparison must account for the continued and additional coal, oil, and gas use that will happen in the absence of a mineral-powered energy transition. Not only does the status quo involve devastating greenhouse gas emissions that wreak havoc on the whole planet, but it also requires local ecological disruption in the form of fossil fuel extraction, which will continually expand as existing fuel deposits are depleted. Fracking and drilling for oil and gas can cause groundwater contamination, oil spills, and the uncontrolled release of planet-warming methane. And mining for coal, of course, is similarly destructive as other kinds of mining.
Explore more stories in this issue

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds
While “there’s a lot of room for improvement with metals mining,” said Julie Klinger, a mineral supply chains expert at the University of Delaware, “look at the devastation that fossil fuel extraction has brought.”

Indeed, the most mined resource today is coal, with around 8.7 billion tons produced in 2023 alone. We need fossil fuels in such large quantities precisely because they are fuels, continuously shoveled into power plants to generate energy. By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines require a fixed quantity of metals only during the construction phase — and once built, they can produce energy for several decades without additional inputs. Because of this, experts agree that the world will actually see a net decrease in energy-related mining if we replace fossil fuels with metals-powered technologies.

In 2023, a team of scientists and Deloitte consultants in the Netherlands projected future metal and coal demand under an ambitious scenario where humanity reaches net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. They found that, despite a more than sixfold increase in demand for energy-related metals — bringing the total up to just over 3 billion tons — total global ore extraction would decrease by a third because of the decline in coal mining.

Trucks carry material at an open-cast coal mine in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, in 2023.
Matthew Horwood / Getty Images

In any case, mining for energy transition minerals will likely only ever constitute a relatively small proportion of global mining activity. Mines cover less than 0.02 percent of Earth’s surface, but many of them are for iron and aluminum, which we need in ever-increasing quantities to build the world around us, regardless of where we get our energy. “That will dwarf anything that’s actually used for the energy transition,” said geologist Gawen Jenkin of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

Most importantly, perhaps, while fossil fuels can only be burned once, many minerals can in principle be used many times over. The Netherlands study estimates that we could slash energy-related mining demand by an additional third in the 2050 net-zero scenario if we were to massively upscale recycling of EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels. The fundamental issue, said Raphael Deberdt, a socioeconomic mining expert at the Colorado School of Mines, is that our economic system incentivizes as much extraction as possible in order to fuel infinite consumption. But shifts to reduce resource consumption — think electric buses and trains rather than SUVs, and reusing old solar panels and EV batteries wherever possible, for instance — and a circular economy that makes the best use of every resource would do wonders to ease the burden of mining.

There are other actions we can take to further reduce the adverse effects of mineral mining. For example, engineers can substitute materials connected to labor or human rights abuses with ones that can be more responsibly sourced; Tesla, for instance, has begun to equip its electric vehicles with iron-phosphate batteries that are cheaper and don’t require cobalt or nickel, which have been linked to environmental and social damage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, respectively. This reflects a broader shift across auto industries — with manufacturers like Renault and Volkswagen reportedly following suit — while iron-phosphate batteries are also becoming increasingly popular for general electricity storage.

There are also many opportunities to extract minerals from the waste of existing mines that were originally built for different purposes. Research by mining and sustainability expert Tim Werner of the University of Melbourne has estimated that waste from a single Canadian zinc mine could supply several years’ worth of global demand for indium, which is used in solar cells, and there are already efforts to recover cobalt from old lead mines in Missouri. Nascent attempts to recover critical minerals from ocean water, plant life, and even asteroids have shown promise, though they are not developed enough to displace traditional methods.

In short, the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” — in precisely that order — retains its importance in an all-renewables world. The more of these changes we adopt, the more luxury we’ll have to choose where and how minerals are mined. “This transition needs to happen,” Werner said. “But we have to be really strategic, really smart, and really conscientious and responsible about where they’re coming from.”

Read the full mining issue

A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future

Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?

The energy transition could turn Greenland into a mining mecca. Would it be for better or for worse?

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: the $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

Tradeoffs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?

Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping projecty

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds

In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels? on Mar 26, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 26, 2025

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds
Since ancient history, mining has been a dirty business. While we’ve developed new tools, chemicals, machines, and techniques, most of today’s mining still boils down to digging in the dirt. As the world ramps up production of the technologies it needs to move away from fossil fuels, this widespread disturbance of Earth and ecosystems will continue in the accelerating search for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare-earth elements.

But what if there were another way? Or, better yet, many other ways. After all, the minerals we need aren’t just buried underground. As the basic building blocks of much of the world’s matter, these elements have accumulated everywhere: in plant life, in the ocean, in our industrial waste, and even in rocks hurtling through outer space. While the ability to pull enough minerals from these sources to power the energy transition is still a long way off, scientists and entrepreneurs are hard at work trying to find out if each of these sources can compete with traditional mining methods. In the process, they’re also raising challenging questions about how far we’ll need to stretch human ingenuity to meet the challenge of the energy transition — and just how clean even the most advanced type of “mining” can ever be.

Mining our water

For more than a century, eccentric scientists have dreamed of wringing precious metals from the Earth’s most vast resource: its oceans. The seas contain millions to trillions of metric tons of gold, cobalt, and other elements, including 17,000 times more lithium than the world’s terrestrial reserves. Unlike more controversial forms of deep-sea mining that require dredging the ocean floor, these dissolved minerals can be extracted directly from the ocean water itself.

In the 1920s, German chemist Fritz Haber hatched a plan to extract gold from seawater in order to pay back Germany’s debt from World War I. But unlike Haber’s other groundbreaking science — he invented synthetic processes that more or less led the way to both modern agriculture and chemical warfare — this effort yielded no real fruit, even after years of research in secret labs on German ships. In the decades since, the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan have all studied seawater as a potential source of uranium, but none of these efforts yielded widespread success, either. The basic problem has always been that the ocean’s elements are dispersed so broadly that extracting them often costs more than the market value of the minerals.

Today, in the face of a looming critical mineral shortage, scientists are renewing their efforts to overcome this hurdle. They’ve turned to an unassuming source: algae. Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim, Washington, are exploring the potential of a type of seaweed that can naturally concentrate minerals at levels thousands of times higher than the surrounding seawater.

For years, the lab had been studying algae — the broad class of photosynthetic organisms that include phytoplankton, seaweed, and kelp — for a completely different reason: as a potential source for renewable biofuels. The lab would grow algae in tanks, then extract all its organic compounds to use for fuel. This process left behind a concentrated powdery waste product, chock-full of all the remaining minerals that weren’t needed for the fuel. At first, researchers didn’t realize the potential of this overlooked byproduct. Scott Edmundson, a research scientist at the lab, recalls when he realized, “Oh, there’s a lot of minerals here that we really are undervaluing.”

As part of an Department of Energy experimental research program, they developed a system to pump seawater into onshore grow tanks full of a type of mineral-loving seaweed called Ulva. From there, they harvested and dried the seaweed, then processed it into the mineral-rich powder, which they dubbed “bio-ore.” This powder contains precious elements like nickel, cobalt, and rare earths at levels thousands of times higher than seawater. For example, concentrations of the rare earth element neodymium — an essential component in wind turbines — can be up to 479,000 times higher than the original seawater.

The dream of pulling gold or cobalt or many other critical minerals out of seawater is still far from being commercially feasible. But scientists like Edmundson — and others like Cornell University scientist Maha Haji, who has designed mineral filters that could be hung from abandoned oil rigs to pull cobalt from the Gulf of Mexico — think seawater mining has the potential to fundamentally reshape how the world sources its minerals.

“If you can make that work, and you can do it in a way that’s environmentally responsible, that has such high potential for providing the minerals we need in a sustainable, egalitarian way,” Edmundson said. “If you have access to the ocean, you have access to the minerals.”

— Jesse Nichols

Mining our weeds

Each spring, Albania’s mountainous roads are suddenly lined by striking yellow weeds with oblong leaves and tiny blossoms. A relative of broccoli, cabbage, and wild mustard, Odontarrhena chalcidica is expertly adapted to the rocky soils of this Balkan country, which are unsuitable for most other kinds of vegetation because of their high nickel content. O. chalcidica has developed the ability to not just survive in this environment, but to use its toxicity to its advantage: The plant draws nickel up from the soil and stores it in its leaves and stems, which botanists believe serves as a defense against predators and diseases.

But this defensive maneuver could also make this unremarkable-looking weed a critical tool for the clean energy transition. For years, scientists have known that plants like O. chalcidica, known as hyperaccumulators, can be harvested and burned to extract the nickel contained within their cells. This is called phytomining. Now, companies are starting to catch on, working to apply phytomining on a scale that could actually put a dent in global demand for nickel, which is used in solar panels, wind turbines, and the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles.

One of these is Metalplant, a startup founded four years ago by three American and Albanian entrepreneurs. Metalplant worked with researchers at Albania’s Agricultural University of Tirana to transform O. chalcidica from a simple weed into a valuable crop. The company estimates that the plant can produce between 440 and 880 pounds of nickel per hectare in one growing season. Theoretically, that means the entire global nickel demand in 2020 could be met by growing O. chalcidica on around 23,000 square miles, an area slightly smaller than West Virginia. Though Metalplant hasn’t yet revealed its buyers, the company harvested its second batch of O. chalcidica last June, containing a few hundred pounds of precious nickel.

Eric Matzner, one of Metalplant’s three co-founders, doesn’t believe supplanting the entire global nickel supply chain is a realistic near-term goal. But he imagines that his company can provide a cleaner source of nickel — one that doesn’t cause the kind of deforestation, air and water pollution, and seizure of Indigenous lands seen in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of the metal. Though traditional nickel mines currently have a cost advantage due to their sheer scale, Metalplant aims to become competitive by providing an additional service: carbon dioxide removal. The company is using a technique known as enhanced rock weathering, which involves spreading crushed rocks containing silicate minerals on O. chalcidica fields as they grow. This rock debris not only boosts yields by replenishing nickel in the soil, but it also reacts with carbon dioxide in the air to lock away the greenhouse gas as a solid, which later gets washed away by rain and ultimately deposited in the ocean.

The result, which the company calls “carbon negative” nickel, can be purchased by carmakers that aim to offset their own carbon emissions. In theory this could enable an electric vehicle to claim carbon neutrality for its entire life cycle. And it’s not just carmakers who are interested: Researchers at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France, recently formed a partnership with steelmaker Aperam to use phytomined nickel in stainless steel production. In March of last year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it would fund research into phytomining, seeking to make the process more efficient and increase its scale — with the ultimate goal of boosting the domestic supply chain for nickel and reducing imports. (ARPA-E, the program that distributes the funding, has been targeted by the Trump administration, and its future role in supporting phytomining research is unclear.)

Companies like Metalplant have a long way to go before they can draw buyers away from established nickel producers in Indonesia. But Albania has a few other advantages: Its mountains are rich in olivine, a rock that’s ideal for ERW, and its numerous hydropower dams provide ample renewable energy needed to crush those rocks so they can be spread and sequester carbon dioxide. Albanian farmers are struggling with poor harvests and an exodus of young people to cities and abroad, which means they welcome the chance to explore new economic opportunities, according to Matzner. The way he sees it, “We’re literally growing money on trees.”

— Diana Kruzman

Mining our waste

Centuries of mining, drilling, and burning fossil fuels has left large swathes of Appalachia covered in a big, toxic mess. Billions of tons of coal ash — the hard residue left over from coal burnt by power plants — are buried or piled in the open air across the region, slowly poisoning the soil and water around them. Heavy metals leak from old mines into nearby creeks, turning the water bright orange as they oxidize. And much of the mineral-rich radioactive liquid that’s used to drill miles underground for fracked natural gas gets deposited into storage wells that can leak into the water tables around them.

These waste streams are so toxic in part because they contain metals and minerals from the coal seams and shale formations from which we draw our fossil fuels. In other words, in one of the many ironies of the climate crisis, fossil fuel extraction has unearthed large quantities of the very materials that could wean us off of carbon-intensive energy: minerals like lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel, which are essential for green infrastructure such as the batteries that store renewable energy.

Scientists have been researching the mineral mining potential of coal waste for decades. Newer research is now also exploring the possibility of pulling lithium from the wastewater produced by oil and gas extraction: A study from the National Energy Technology Laboratory this past May suggests that up to 40 percent of current domestic lithium demand could be sourced from fracking wastewater in the Marcellus Shale. (That quantity is still “strikingly small” relative to anticipated future demand for lithium, according to Sean O’Leary with the Ohio River Valley Institute.)

What’s unknown, however, is whether these minerals can ever be gathered cheaply enough to compete with mining them in more conventional ways. Extracting critical minerals from solid waste like coal ash is a pretty resource- and energy-intensive process: The burnt residue has to be crushed into powder and processed multiple times with acids and sodium hydroxide, and then dissolved into a liquid form to extract the desirable elements. (Processing acid mine drainage is less involved, and therefore less expensive, because it’s already a liquid.)
Explore more stories in this issue

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?

Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?
While a few private companies have partnered with universities to conduct pilot projects — such as Rare Earth Salts, Aqua Metals, and General Electric with Pennsylvania State University; Montana Resources with West Virginia University; and Element USA with the University of Texas, Austin — there are still major questions to answer about the technology’s market viability. In addition to uncertainty about cost competitiveness, is there enough supply to warrant investment in processing plants?

Sarma Pisupati, director of the Center for Critical Minerals at Pennsylvania State University, points out that every coal seam contains a distinct mix of minerals, and it’s difficult to determine the location and volume of a significant store of rare-earth minerals without direct sampling from a given site. “We need detailed analysis and estimates of reserves that we have in the ground before we can sink in millions and millions of dollars to build a plant,” he said.

We have some early ideas of what those reserves might look like. A 2024 study from the University of Texas estimates that there are 11 million tons of rare-earth elements in coal ash reserves around the country, but there’s huge variation in the types and concentration of those elements between, say, waste sites in Wyoming and Pennsylvania. Another report from the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management notes that processing such a relatively small mass of these elements from thousands of tons of coal ash means that any commercial mineral extraction plant would have to find some other economic purpose — like turning the leftover, post-processing coal waste into fertilizer or concrete additives.

Alternatively, fossil fuel companies themselves could be incentivized to extract the in-demand minerals from their own waste. This is one reason why environmental groups are ambivalent on the promise of mineral extraction from fossil fuel waste, according to Rob Altenburg, senior director of climate and energy for the organization PennFuture, an environmental advocacy nonprofit in Pennsylvania. On one hand, an economic motivation to clean up and utilize fossil fuel waste could be a boon for ecosystems and communities dealing with legacy pollution.

“But when you are essentially giving [fossil fuel] companies another revenue stream, are you creating a net benefit for the environment by addressing this waste, or are you subsidizing something … that is then going to outcompete a cleaner alternative?” he said.

— Eve Andrews

Mining outer space

A big problem with finding the metals needed to power the energy transition is that the purest ores available in Earth’s crust have long been used up. The more we mine, the more we’re chasing lower-quality, harder-to-access reserves.

To bypass the increasing environmental cost associated with churning up our world to access the riches stored within, starry-eyed entrepreneurs and engineers have turned their gazes to the heavens. They’re hoping that primordial rocks left over from the formation of the solar system, drifting between the planets untouched for eons, could provide all the metals that humanity might need for centuries to come.

“Asteroid mining as a whole is the only solution that anybody has devised that is a holistic approach to cleaning up mining,” said Matt Gialich, founder and CEO of the California-based company AstroForge.

AstroForge and a small handful of competitors are proposing different ways to one day extract materials from an asteroid and return them to Earth. But the nascent industry has a long path ahead: To date, only three missions — none of which was undertaken by the private sector — have successfully visited asteroids near Earth and returned home with samples.

But in late February, AstroForge’s Odin spacecraft hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside other vehicles destined for the moon. If successful, Odin would be the first commercial deep-space mission in history, likely traversing hundreds of millions of miles before darting by its target asteroid to photograph it and confirm its metallic composition. (After launch, however, Odin appeared to be in a slow, uncontrolled tumble on its way to deep space, and Gialich and his team struggled to communicate with the spacecraft. As it drifts further into deep space, their chances of success diminish.)

Metallic asteroids are prime targets for off-world mining because of the high concentrations of valuable elements — particularly nickel, cobalt, iron, and platinum-group metals — they may contain. (Until a spacecraft successfully visits one of these bodies, we really only have estimates based on meteorites believed to have originated from similar asteroids.) At first, the space miners would focus on platinum and related metals because they are some of the most valuable on Earth: A ton of platinum costs over $30 million, whereas a ton of nickel sells for around $20,000. Gialich estimates that Astroforge’s future mining missions could return one ton of platinum each.

Eventually, once they have established their profitability and can shift to collecting the abundant iron, nickel, and cobalt that asteroids also contain, Gialich and others hope that a thriving asteroid mining industry could lead to a mining moratorium on Earth.

“I think if we are successful,” Gialich said, “this makes precious metal mining on the planet illegal.”

Before that happens, there are a lot of kinks to be worked out. Right now, under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country can lay territorial claims to land on another world, whether that be the moon, an asteroid, or Mars. But emerging national laws have given companies and countries the license to extract materials and have a legal claim to anything they can physically take for themselves.

More importantly, perhaps, no one yet knows the best way to extract these metals. Some have suggested using special chemicals to dissolve the materials and filter out the desirable metals. Others have talked about using magnetic rakes to comb through the pulverized dust coating the asteroids to pull out the rocks and granules that contain platinum group metals. One recent paper even proposed using nuclear thermal rockets to melt the asteroids, then collecting the molten materials in crucibles and allowing evaporation to separate the metals.

Even if a workable method is devised and the raw cost-revenue calculations work out to make it a profitable industry, space mining raises deeper questions. The launches required to hurtle mining vessels into deep space would take tremendous amounts of fuel and further contribute to the space industry’s growing problems of polluting the upper atmosphere and damaging biodiversity. The mining itself, without proper regulations, may even create new streams of meteors that could endanger satellites providing crucial services to the people of Earth.

Despite its challenges, many in and around the field argue that their efforts will not only make the energy transition more sustainable, but that they will also be a necessary step for humanity to evolve beyond our earthly cradle. But is it worth expanding into the final frontier if we haven’t yet learned to tread lightly?

— Syris Valentine

Read the full mining issue

A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future

Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?

The energy transition could turn Greenland into a mining mecca. Would it be for better or for worse?

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: the $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

Tradeoffs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?

Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping projecty

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds

In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds on Mar 26, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 26, 2025

In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline
TThe world is on the brink of a new “gold rush.” Except this time, countries are rushing to control the minerals required for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. And instead of continuing to dig tunnels or pits, some scientists are looking to a promising — but challenging — source of minerals that has tormented researchers for decades: seawater.

The ocean holds far more than just water and salt. Pretty much every naturally occurring element on the periodic table can be found in seawater, from gold and silver to lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

The problem? For most of history, these metals have been out of reach, because they exist at levels so low that it’s kind of hard to even wrap your head around.

Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Grist

Imagine an olympic-sized swimming pool full of seawater. If you were to separate all the elements, you’d be left with about half a kilogram of lithium, 1.2 grams of nickel, 3 milligrams of cobalt, and similarly small amounts of other sought-after metals. While that might not seem like a lot, the world’s oceans contain about 534 trillion olympic-sized pools’ worth of water. So, while there might not be much, say, cobalt in that hypothetical pool of seawater, there’s a lot of cobalt in the actual seas. In fact, the ocean contains 46 times more cobalt than all of the world’s land reserves combined.

“When you multiply it by this vast volume of seawater on planet Earth — that’s a huge gold mine,” said Scott Edmundson, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab. “There’s a gold mine, literally right at our shoreline.”

For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to tap into the ocean’s mineral stores — perhaps none more infamous than the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber started his career as an idealistic young scientist, determined to use chemistry to save the world from famine. At the turn of the 20th century, he invented a method to pull the key ingredient for fertilizer out of thin air — a technique that allowed farmers to grow enough food to save an estimated 3.5 billion lives from starvation. But when World War I broke out, Haber’s story took a dark turn. He retooled his fertilizer factories to make chemical weapons for the Germans instead.

German chemist Fritz Haber developed an innovative technique to pull the key ingredient for fertilizer out of thin air. Later, he infamously turned his attentions toward developing chemical weapons for Germany during World War I. After the war, Haber (third from left) experimented with pulling gold from seawater. Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin

After Germany lost the war, the country was in shambles, riddled with war debt. And Haber — now shunned by the scientific community — decided to turn his efforts toward saving his country’s economy. Haber knew that the oceans were filled with gold. And he hatched a plan to extract it. “The legend is that he had this chemistry lab on a transatlantic ocean liner going back and forth and doing seawater chemistry experiments,” Edmundson said. “And it worked — technically.”

Haber’s invention was able to put gold out of seawater. The problem was that it was super inefficient: It turned out that gold was 1,000 times less abundant than he’d expected. Meaning the gold he extracted wasn’t valuable even enough to cover the costs of operating his machinery.

While Haber’s seawater mining plan failed spectacularly, for many scientists, the dream of extracting minerals from the ocean lived on. For example, over the following decades, researchers in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan all looked into ways to harvest uranium from seawater. But none of those efforts led to widespread success.

And yet today, there’s a renewed interest in seawater, not for gold or uranium, but for the minerals needed for today’s energy transition. A team of scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Sequim, Washington, have a new plan to extract minerals from the sea, this time, using a billion-year-old living technology: seaweed.

A team of scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Sequim, Washington, are extracting minerals from the sea using seaweed. Grist

Seaweed is a type of algae — a huge class of photosynthetic organisms that primarily grow in the water. They range from microscopic phytoplankton all the way to giant kelp, which can grow a whopping 2 feet per day. And they all grow by absorbing light from the sun and sucking nutrients and minerals and dissolved CO2 directly out of the ocean.

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab had already been studying algae for decades as a potential way to make renewable biofuel. They’d grow different kinds of algae in the lab, and then they’d refine it, extracting out all the organic matter for fuel. Without that organic matter, they were left with a powder made of all the stuff that the algae had pulled out of the seawater — including minerals. Initially, that powder was seen as a waste product. But as demand for renewable energy started to take off, the lab realized that its “waste product” was full of the same minerals required for this renewable boom.

“That’s where we started looking at, ‘oh, there’s a lot of minerals here that we really are undervaluing,’” Edmundson said.
Explore more stories in this issue

Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: The $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds
Scott Edmundson and his colleagues at the lab dove in, trying to figure out if they really could get usable minerals from this algae waste product. The first step was finding the right type of algae. They scoured Washington’s coasts, searching for the species that concentrated the most critical minerals. This led them to a fast-growing native seaweed called ulva.

“Ulva is one of my favorite seaweeds,” Edmundson said. “It’s definitely a rockstar of the seaweed world.”

Researchers at the lab built a system to pump seawater into their onshore lab. This allowed them to fine tune the temperature, lighting, and currents to create the perfect conditions for ulva to suck up minerals. The seaweed is so good at filtering out minerals that mineral levels can be up to a million of times higher than the original seawater.

“The seaweeds have this remarkable capacity to bring it up orders of magnitude,” Edmundson said. “So you’re getting into the realm of, now we can do something with it.”

Research scientist Scott Edmundson holds two small jars full of bio-ore collected from dried seaweed. Grist

Once the seaweed has been harvested and dried, researchers use a machine that heats and pressurizes it, turning all the organic matter into a liquid that they can use for things like biofuels. This process leaves behind that mineral-rich powder, which they call bio-ore.

On a recent visit to the lab, Edmundson showed me a small container of bio-ore, which resembled a colorless powder. “All the organics in the seaweed have been removed, and we’re just left with the minerals,” Edmundson said, holding the jar. He then picked up another jar filled with a clay-red colored powder. “Each seaweed has this different mineral composition,” he said. “This one you can see is much, much redder. So this one has much higher iron content.”

At this point, the bio-ore is concentrated enough for a mining processor to turn it into pure minerals for batteries or solar panels.

Beyond seaweed, scientists are looking at other ways to extract minerals from the ocean. Maha Haji, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is working on a plan to hang big mineral filters off of decommissioned oil rigs. A few years ago, she looked into what would happen if all the retiring oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were instead converted into seawater mineral extractors.

“With a little bit more research and development on the materials side, you could maybe extract over a quarter of the cobalt demand in the United States,” Haji said. “That’s a sizable amount of cobalt.”

While large-scale seawater mining is still a ways off, both scientists feel this technology has the potential to completely reshape mining as we know it. For most of history, precious minerals have been clustered in a handful of resource-rich hotspots. In those hotspots, people would do whatever it took to control those resources: They’d fight wars, destroy surrounding ecosystems, or violate human rights.

Seawater mining could change that. For starters, 77 percent of countries have access to a coastline. “It opens up a whole new world where pretty much any country with a coastline could harvest minerals for their own use,” Haji said. “It almost democratizes mining and mineral harvesting.”

For Edmundson, he sees seaweed as a way to turn mining into an environmentally positive activity, since the seaweed can filter out pollutants and combat ocean acidification.

“If you can make that work, and you can do it in a way that’s environmentally responsible, that has such high potential for providing the minerals we need in a sustainable kind of egalitarian way,” Edmundson said. “If you have access to the ocean, you have access to the minerals.”

Read the full mining issue

A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future

Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source

Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?

The energy transition could turn Greenland into a mining mecca. Would it be for better or for worse?

Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: the $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

Tradeoffs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?

Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping projecty

The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds

In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline on Mar 26, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 25, 2025

Can cities ban natural gas in new buildings? A federal judge just said yes.

Cities looking to eliminate fossil fuels in buildings have notched a decisive court victory. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by plumbing and building trade groups against a New York City ban on natural gas in new buildings. The decision is the first to explicitly disagree with a previous ruling that struck down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban. That order, issued by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023 and upheld again last year, prompted cities across the country to withdraw or delay laws modeled after the Berkeley ordinance.

While New York City’s law functions differently from Berkeley’s, legal experts say that this month’s decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings — and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action.

“It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.”

In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances, like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.

Berkeley’s law, on the other hand, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. The first-of-its-kind policy was passed in 2019 and inspired nearly a hundred local governments across the country to introduce similar laws. But the ordinance quickly faced a lawsuit by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. In April 2023, the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of the restaurant industry, holding that federal energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s policy. In January 2024, a petition by the city of Berkeley to rehear the case on the 9th Circuit was denied.

Berkeley’s law, which was struck down by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction.
Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

Last year’s denial of a rehearing included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.”

One year later, that’s exactly what happened. In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, or EPCA. This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York’s, that would prevent the use of fossil-fuel powered appliances that meet national standards.

“By design, the city set that level so low as to ban all gas and oil appliances,” the groups wrote in their complaint. “The city’s gas ban thus prohibits all fuel gas appliances, violating federal law” and “presents a significant threat for businesses in New York City that sell, install, and service gas plumbing and infrastructure.”

Berkeley’s gas ban lost a lawsuit filed by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry.
Franco Origlia / Getty Images

Citing the 9th Circuit’s dissent, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed those claims. The plaintiffs’ argument broadens the scope of EPCA beyond reasonable bounds, District Judge Ronnie Abrams wrote in the court’s opinion. Regulating fuel use within certain buildings is standard practice in states and cities, she noted: New York City, for example, has banned the indoor use of kerosene space heaters for decades. “Were plaintiffs correct about the scope of EPCA, these vital safety regulations would likewise be preempted — an absurd result that the court must avoid,” Abrams wrote.

The decision could help reassure some states and cities that withdrew electrification plans after the Berkeley case, said Dror Ladin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief on behalf of local environmental groups in the lawsuit. “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly,” he said. The argument brought forth by trade groups “is one that would bar a whole host of health and safety regulations, and alter the power of cities and states in a way that we’ve never seen in this country.”

By agreeing with the 9th Circuit dissent’s interpretation of EPCA, last week’s decision bolsters all types of electrification policies, including the one in New York City and those modeled after Berkeley, Turner noted. “This decision we’ve just gotten from the Southern District is more broadly protective,” she said. “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.”

The trade groups behind the lawsuit have said they will appeal the decision. Meanwhile, legal challenges using the same arguments brought against Berkeley’s gas ban have been launched against New York’s statewide building code and electrification policies in places like Denver, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

Judges in those cases will inevitably refer to the Berkeley decision and last week’s ruling by the Southern District of New York, said Ladin — and he hopes they’ll give more weight to the latter. “Berkeley is not a well-reasoned decision, and this judge saw right through it, and I think many other judges will see through it too.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can cities ban natural gas in new buildings? A federal judge just said yes. on Mar 25, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 22, 2025

Gutting clean energy incentives would drive up electric bills

The Trump administration insists that renewables are making energy more expensive and that more fossil-fueled power will reduce utility bills. But those claims are false — and if congressional Republicans succeed in repealing key tax credits supporting the growth of clean energy, Americans will suffer the consequences in higher electric bills.

So finds a report released Thursday by think tank Energy Innovation warning lawmakers of the costs of repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.

The fate of those tax credits remains highly uncertain. Some Republican lawmakers have voiced support for keeping them in place, but others have criticized the incentives, which could channel hundreds of billions of dollars to solar and wind power, batteries, electric vehicles, and other carbon-free technologies over the next decade. President Donald Trump has also vowed to repeal the IRA.

Key members of the Trump administration have disparaged clean energy as a wasteful distraction while praising fossil gas and coal. Last week at an industry event, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said wind and solar have “obvious scale and cost problems,” and dismissed their prospects for serving more than a fraction of the country’s power needs.

But Energy Innovation’s report repeats findings from a series of studies over the past months that forecast major downsides to repealing the tax credits, including lost jobs, hundreds of billions of dollars of foregone investment — and significantly more expensive electricity for U.S. businesses and households.

Energy Innovation projects that energy costs for U.S. households will rise if key IRA clean energy tax credits are repealed and other federal climate funding disappears. Energy Innovation

“We looked at a state-by-state level at energy bills as well as jobs and economic growth,” said Robbie Orvis, Energy Innovation’s senior director of modeling and analysis. “Across the board, repealing the IRA is going to make it more expensive for the average household — and in some states, dramatically.”

The report modeled electricity costs in two scenarios — one in which current incentives and federal funding are kept in place, and one in which they are repealed this year. Under the “repeal” scenario, annual consumer energy bills would be more than $6 billion higher for U.S. households in 2030 and more than $9 billion higher in 2035. Translated to individual households, energy costs would increase by an average of $48 per year in 2030 and $68 per year in 2035, and continue to rise in future years.

Some states will see relatively low increases, Orvis said. “But when you look out over 2035, most households are over $100 per year in energy expenditures.”

The findings are consistent with other recent studies on the same topic.

Last month, The Brattle Group published a report, commissioned by conservative environmental advocacy group ConservAmerica, that found repeal of the clean energy tax credits would increase residential electric bills nationwide by an average of $83 per year by 2035, and up to $152 per year in California, New England, and much of the upper Midwest.

And NERA Economic Consulting projected in a February report commissioned by the Clean Energy Buyers Association trade group that repealing the tax credits would drive average U.S. electricity prices up nearly 10 percent by 2029, and by more than 30 percent for commercial and industrial electricity customers in certain states.

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Republican leaders have committed to slashing federal spending to pay for the cost of extending the multi-trillion-dollar tax cut passed during the first Trump administration, which primarily benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Cutting clean energy incentives could be on the chopping block as a result, although they’d only cover a fraction of the tax breaks.

But most of the investment in clean energy facilities and factories spurred by the law has been in states and congressional districts represented by Republicans, potentially making the path to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives more difficult.

Last week, 21 GOP Congress members wrote a letter demanding to preserve those tax credits, saying they’re critical to growing the economy and achieving the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda. They also warned that repealing them “would increase utility bills the very next day.”

Why clean power is cheaper power

The reason repealing these tax credits would drive up costs is simple, Orvis said. Solar and wind energy can supply U.S. power grids with electricity at lower long-term cost than alternatives such as coal, gas, and nuclear power plants. The more of it that can be built, the more it can supplant those costlier resources.

Over the past decade, solar and wind power have become the cheapest source of new electricity generation across the majority of the world, according to the International Energy Agency. Those cost advantages have been driven primarily by technology improvements and economies of scale of production as well as the deployment of solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and wind turbines, although government subsidies have played an important role.

In the U.S., newly built solar and wind farms can provide power at a cheaper rate than 99 percent of the country’s remaining coal plants. Even fossil gas, the workhorse of the U.S. grid, struggles to compete with new clean energy. A study from think tank RMI found that portfolios of solar, wind, and batteries paired with utility energy-efficiency investments can serve grid needs at a lower cost than newly built gas-fired power plants.

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What’s more, the cost of solar and wind power isn’t tied to fluctuations in the price of fossil gas, which has driven significant electricity price increases in the past several years, Orvis said. That lack of fuel cost, along with lower operations and maintenance costs, make wind and solar a long-run winner financially.

Energy developers and utilities are following the money. Last year, solar, batteries, and wind made up more than 90 percent of the 56 gigawatts of power capacity built in the U.S. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts solar will lead power plant construction and that battery installations will break records again in 2025.

Wind and solar farms do cost more to build than the equivalent gas power plants, however. That makes the pace and scale of their growth more dependent on the cost of capital, which is influenced by interest rates, and on incentives to reduce those up-front costs. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged federal tax credits that have supported the industry for decades, delivering the law’s single biggest boost to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while helping to finance cheaper electricity.

Cutting off those tax credits would curtail that growth and leave the country more reliant on fossil-fueled power plants that would not only create planet-warming emissions and harmful local air pollution but cost U.S. consumers more money. That would add roughly $20 billion in additional fuel, operations, and maintenance costs to U.S. electricity prices per year in 2030 and 2035, according to Energy Innovation’s analysis.

An ‘energy emergency’ — false claims versus real solutions

The Trump administration has moved to undo decades of federal policy seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fight climate change, and protect the environment. It has also declared a “national energy emergency” that casts renewable energy as a threat to grid reliability and calls for expanded use of fossil fuels as the solution.

Energy Secretary Wright, a longtime gas industry executive who has denied that climate change is a crisis, attacked solar and wind power in his keynote address at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston last week. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down,” he said.

But that assertion is “not borne out by the data at all,” Orvis said. Rising risks of grid outages and emergencies are primarily driven by increasingly extreme weather, which is linked to global warming. And while the variability of wind and solar power generation is intimately tied to weather, traditional power plants have proven to be far less reliable than their backers have claimed, particularly during winter cold snaps like those that led to massive grid outages in Texas in 2021 and across the U.S. Southeast in 2022.

As for clean energy’s relationship to rising electricity prices, an Energy Innovation report last year highlighted that surging electric utility costs in recent years are linked not to renewables but other factors, including spikes in fossil gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increasing cost of expanding and maintaining utility power grids.

Ember

A report out last week from think tank Ember reiterated the absence of data to correlate reliance on clean energy and utility electricity costs. “Some states with high wind and solar penetration — such as Iowa, South Dakota and Kansas — have some of the lowest electricity prices in the country,” the report notes.

Other states with aggressive clean-energy mandates, such as California and Massachusetts, also have some of the country’s most expensive electricity, the report says. But those costs are more closely driven by aging infrastructure, “expensive imported fossil fuels” in the case of Massachusetts, or in California, “natural disaster damage” — namely, the massive costs of wildfires, many caused by utility grid failures, and the investments meant to prevent more of them.

More broadly speaking, the cost of electric utility service is primarily tied to rising investments in utility transmission and distribution grids and the cost of fuel to power their generation, said Paul DeCotis, a senior partner at consultancy West Monroe. And “if people are concerned about the high cost of fuel, the federal government has made tax credits available for decades for renewable energy, which brings down the cost of electricity.”

In his speech at CERAWeek, Wright also mocked the idea that wind, solar, and batteries could completely replace fossil fuels for providing reliable round-the-clock generation capacity. But the U.S. isn’t facing that problem in the near term. Instead, it must cheaply and quickly build new capacity to meet the country’s growing power needs — and clean energy and batteries are best positioned to do that, according to energy industry analysts and executives.

The U.S. is experiencing a first-in-decades boom in demand for electricity, driven by new data centers and factories in the short term, and in the longer term by the push to shift from fossil-fueled to electric vehicles and building heating. A number of utilities are proposing to build gigawatts of new gas-fired power plants to meet that demand. But as of today, manufacturers of gas turbines say they’re unable to supply power plants not already in planning until 2028 or 2029.

“If we’re really in this energy security and energy supply scenario this administration has talked about, we’re not going to be able to meet it with gas, because we’re tapped out on building it,” Orvis said.

New solar, wind, and battery projects can be built in roughly half that time, making them a vital near-term solution to rising power demand, NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum told The New York Times at CERAWeek, adding that “if you take renewables and storage off the table, we’re going to force electricity prices to the moon.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gutting clean energy incentives would drive up electric bills on Mar 22, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 20, 2025

Farmer In Peru Takes Major Germany Energy Firm To Court

A lawsuit filed by a Peruvian farmer against major German energy company RWE began on Monday.

The claim, which argues that global heating fueled by the firm’s greenhouse gas emissions poses a risk to the farmer’s home, could set a new precedent for climate litigation, reported The Associated Press.

“We have waited 10 years for this day, this decisive day,” said Saúl Luciano Lliuya, as supporters cheered outside the courthouse. “I’m very excited; I hope that everything goes well.”

The lawsuit, filed in the Higher Regional Court in Hamm, western Germany, makes the case that RWE’s historical emissions have contributed to the global warming that has accelerated glacial melt near Lliuya’s hometown of Huaraz.

The post Farmer In Peru Takes Major Germany Energy Firm To Court appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
March 19, 2025

Time is running out to take action on standing charges

There’s less than 24 hours left to respond to energy regulator Ofgem’s latest consultation on unfair standing charges on energy bills.

Campaign group Fuel Poverty Action is urging the public to take action and call on it to finally scrap the unjust flat-rate levy. This is because, despite Ofgem’s warm words on a “zero standing charge option” – that’s not at all what the energy regulator is actually putting forward.

Ofgem standing charges: consultation set to close soon

As the Canary previously reported, Ofgem is currently running a consultation on the standing charge it applies to people’s energy bills.

Ofgem explains that this is a cost:

that is included in your electricity and gas bill. It is also included in the energy price cap.

Your energy supplier will charge you a standing charge cost each day, even if you do not use any energy on that day. The amount you pay will depend on your supplier, how you pay for your energy and where you live within England, Scotland or Wales.

However, the standing charge is an extremely unfair flat-rate levy on customers, disproportionately impacting the poorest households. Crucially, the charge is cementing fuel poverty.

It’s why many people think Ofgem should abolish the standing charge altogether – and have demanded it do so in a number of previous consultations.

The ‘strength of feeling’ against cruel standing charges

Since late 2023, Ofgem has been consulting on these. Over 30,000 members of the public responded to its first consultation, which the regulator itself acknowledged:

demonstrated the strength of feeling among the public for change

On top of this, in September 2024, more than 20,000 people again flooded Ofgem’s inbox calling for change on the standing charge component of consumer energy bills.

Crucially, prominent among these changes was for Ofgem to completely scrap the standing charges. Instead, respondents said it should shift:

these costs to energy suppliers to absorb using profits

Now, this is exactly what campaign group Fuel Poverty Action is asking it to do – and wants to public to join them in demanding.

The regulator is once again consulting on standing charges.

It has put forward an alternative proposal which it’s calling a “zero standing charge energy price cap variant”. However, the name is deceiving, because it amounts to little more than moving money around. In reality, it’s only offering to shift this cost onto the unit price of customers’ bills – so in effect, the standing charge will still exist.

Third time’s the charm?

So Fuel Poverty Action has put together a template letter for people to fill out and send to Ofgem in response to its latest consultation. However, Ofgem is closing its consultation on 20 March – so people will have to hurry to respond.

And notably, it sets out how Ofgem can do-away with standing charges and indeed force profiteering energy companies to shoulder the costs. Notably, it lays out that the energy system could do this with a Rising Block Tariff in the form of its Energy For All proposal. This would:

everyone a share of the free and cheap renewable energy we generate.

And crucially, this would be funded by:

the £billions in excess profits, subsidies and costs of energy firms.

So now, you can join the campaign group in telling Ofgem that there is a better way forward than its sham “zero standing charge option”.

Fuel Poverty Action has pointed out to supporters that their:

record-breaking response to Ofgem’s last two consultations on energy bill standing charges helped to force Ofgem and Government to agree to reform the standing charge.

There’s still time to add your letter to the tens of thousands of people holding the regulator to account. And maybe, third time might actually be the charm.

You can use and adapt Fuel Poverty Action’s letter here to respond to the consultation. There’s no time to waste.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

This post was originally published on Canary.
March 17, 2025

Trump repeals America’s first-ever tax on greenhouse gases before it goes into effect

In late February, Republicans in the House and Senate voted along party lines to repeal a Biden-era rule implementing a federal tax on methane pollution. President Donald Trump signed the measure into law on Friday — putting the country’s climate goals further out of reach. Since taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress this year, Republicans have set about systematically dismantling Biden-era advancements on climate change, no matter the size or projected economic impact of the policy, with varying degrees of success.

Methane is a powerful but fast-acting greenhouse gas — it packs a big punch in the short term and weakens over time. Studies show methane is responsible for 20 to 30 percent of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. U.S. oil and gas operations are collectively responsible for emitting more than 6 million metric tons of methane every year — the equivalent of 10 percent of the country’s annual CO2 emissions, if you’re looking at a greenhouse gas’s first 20 years in the atmosphere. Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which often leaks out of drilling sites, pipelines, and storage facilities.

When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, he made it clear that he intended to become the first president in American history to successfully take on climate change — a goal that necessarily included targeting methane emissions. In 2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — legislation that offered hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives, loans, and grants to households, utilities, and industries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

The IRA also amended the Clean Air Act to include a provision that directed the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a methane fee for major producers of oil and gas — essentially, taxing fossil fuel companies for every ton of the greenhouse gas they emitted above a certain threshold. The legislation included subsidies to help producers who emitted methane over the legal limit to install gas-trapping technology to reduce their emissions.

The rule the EPA finalized in November last year, technically called the Waste Emissions Charge, would have applied to facilities that produce volumes of methane that exceed the equivalent of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide. The fee started at $900 per ton of methane in 2024 and would have risen to $1,200 per ton in 2025 and $1,600 in 2026 and every year beyond that. Most big oil and gas companies already meet the standards laid out in Biden’s fee, which means they wouldn’t have had to pay anything. The EPA was supposed to start tallying up fees this year based on 2024 emissions data, but Republicans repealed it before the agency could start collecting penalties.

The fee, had it taken effect, would have been the first-ever federal tax directly imposed on a greenhouse gas. It would have applied to roughly a third of the methane emissions that come from oil and gas infrastructure in the U.S. and diverted 1.2 metric tons of methane through 2035 — the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars offline for a year.

Shell, BP, and other oil majors supported the initiative. But other parts of the oil and gas industry, and Republicans in Congress, opposed it.

Natural gas is flared during an oil drilling operation in the Permian Basin in Andrews, Texas, in 2022.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images

“No one wants to do business when the federal government creates regulations that will put them out of business, which is what this natural gas tax is doing,” said Republican August Pfluger of San Angelo, Texas, the Congressman who wrote the measure that Trump signed on Friday. Pfluger’s district overlaps with the Permian Basin, the highest producing oil field in the U.S. “In reality this rule has only stifled American energy production, discouraged investment, and increased energy prices across America,” he said.

Pfluger’s pessimistic view of the health of America’s oil and gas industry is at odds with what official reports say. America’s fossil fuel producers are on a winning streak by every measure. The U.S. is the largest exporter of natural gas in the world, and crude oil and natural gas production hit record highs in December. The Texas oil and gas industry broke new production records on Monday.

“It’s hard to imagine how a country that’s breaking records for production is being somehow constrained,” said Jon Goldstein, associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy transition program. “I don’t think that argument really holds water.”

However, the tax tackled only a sliver of U.S. methane emissions. The American agricultural and waste sectors produced almost twice as much methane as fossil fuel production between 2010 and 2019. But clamping down on emissions from those sectors is challenging. Methane emissions from agriculture come from myriad decentralized sources, like cows and manure storage facilities, making them difficult to regulate. And the amount of methane agriculture produces depends in large part on consumer eating habits, which are hard for the government to control.

Despite its limited impact, the methane fee was a step in the right direction, experts said. “There’s an order of operations in which we need to implement climate solutions,” said Daniel Jasper, the policy director for the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. “Methane is something we call an emergency brake, because we’ve got to do it now.”

The fee is one of seven climate and environment policies Republicans in Congress are targeting using the Congressional Review Act — a law that gives lawmakers the authority to reverse recently-passed regulations with a simple majority vote. But Republicans only repealed the EPA rule establishing the methane fee — not the IRA provision permitting the application of such a fee in the first place. If that remains intact, a future presidential administration could pick up where Biden left off. However, Republicans in Congress have signaled that they intend to repeal as much of the IRA as possible in the coming months, including the portions that empower the EPA to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump repeals America’s first-ever tax on greenhouse gases before it goes into effect on Mar 17, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 17, 2025

Another scandal is brewing around standing charges on your energy bills
Spineless energy regulator Ofgem is failing to scrap the unjust flat-rate daily standing charges on energy bills. Currently, it’s running another consultation on this, with a purported “zero standing charge option” on the table. However, one campaign group has said the regulator is only “pretending” to get rid of it. This is because, in actual fact, it’s not abolishing this at all. In reality, it’s simply proposing to hide this in another part of the publics’ energy bills.

So once again, it’s set to do nothing to curb the soaring and unaffordable costs of households’ energy bills. After all, that would be too much like curtailing surging energy company profiteering – something Ofgem isn’t really seriously prepared to do.

Ofgem standing charges: disproportionately hitting the poorest households

As Ofgem explains:

A standing charge is one of the costs that is included in your electricity and gas bill. It is also included in the energy price cap.

Your energy supplier will charge you a standing charge cost each day, even if you do not use any energy on that day. The amount you pay will depend on your supplier, how you pay for your energy and where you live within England, Scotland or Wales.

Notably though, the standing charge is an extremely unfair flat-rate levy on customers, disproportionately impacting the poorest households. Crucially, the charge is cementing fuel poverty – as a previous survey from campaign group Organise highlighted. Writing on its findings from polling the impact of the charge on 45,000 people, the Canary’s Steve Topple detailed that:
standing charges impact adequate heating for 90% of people, with:
- 84% forced to cut heating, showers, baths, washing, and drying.
- 72% left in debt or unable to top up a prepayment meter.
Those on prepayment meters are one group hit hard by standing charges.

534,462 electricity customers and 269,351 gas customers were cut off between January and March 2023. However, this Ofgem data only covers 4% of households, so ignores millions of other low income struggling households. This includes the two million homes without gas supply that pay the higher electricity standing charges and unit costs.
And because of the way it works, the standing charge also makes up a disproportionate amount of low energy users’ bills.

Naturally, these typically tend to be poorer households who can’t afford to use as much in the first place. In other words, the higher proportion of what they pay for their bills goes towards the standing charges. It can even literally mean that those who haven’t used any energy for months build up this inflated cost.

It’s why many people think Ofgem should abolish the standing charge altogether. Yet, the regulator has instead resisted all calls to do so to date.

Overwhelming public demand to scrap the standing charge

Since late 2023, Ofgem has been consulting on standing charges. It closed its first consultation over it in January 2024. Over 30,000 members of the public responded to this, which the regulator itself acknowledged:

demonstrated the strength of feeling among the public for change

Crucially, prominent among these changes was for Ofgem to completely scrap the standing charges. Instead, respondents said it should shift:

these costs to energy suppliers to absorb using profits

Then, it followed this up with a second consultation which closed in September 2024. More than 20,000 people again flooded Ofgem’s inbox calling for it to do away with the charge. Largely, this was thanks to a campaign by Fuel Poverty Action, Green New Deal Rising, and the Peace and Justice Project.

Despite the enormous public demand for this, Ofgem is still obstinately refusing to do so. It has put forward an alternative proposal which it’s now once again consulting on.

It’s calling this a “zero standing charge energy price cap variant”. However, the name is deceiving, because it amounts to little more than moving money around. In reality, it’s only offering to shift this cost onto the unit price of customers’ bills – so in effect, the standing charge will still exist.

Another consultation…

So now, Fuel Poverty Action is once again stepping up, alongside the Energy For All campaign, and are asking the public to do the same.

The groups have put together a template letter for people to fill out and send to Ofgem in response to the consultation. As it notes in this, it has also put this together since Ofgem has made the consultation itself complex and inaccessible:

We need you to tell Ofgem what they are proposing is not good enough. They are trying to make it hard for people to respond with a long and complicated form. If you’ve not got much time, we’ve made it easy by drafting a letter that you can adapt

The Word document form for it runs to 44 pages, packed full of largely impenetrable information.

Fuel Poverty Action and Energy For All’s letter breaks through the bluster and makes clear, actionable demands for Ofgem to get:

our money back from profiteering energy firms and brings our bills down. It also suggests a zero-standing charge option that includes free essential energy to protect everyone, Energy For All.

In other words, it’s telling the regulator in no uncertain terms what it really should be doing. That is: protecting customers from parasitic energy companies.

Lining the pockets of the big energy corporations

Gallingly, Ofgem has framed the standing charges cost as a necessity, stating in its consultation that:

Standing charges represent costs of the energy system that do need to be paid for. Therefore, in designing a zero standing charge energy price cap variant we are considering how these costs are paid for, not whether they are paid.

Of course, it’s failing to mention that what these standing charges also do is facilitate energy companies making enormous profits.

Fuel Poverty Action’s letter emphasises this very incongruity given a recent cronyist move by Ofgem. Specifically, it notes that:

You claim all these costs are essential, but that’s not true. You’ve just gifted network firms an extra £3.9 billion. Now you need to give us our money back by taking this money off our standing charges. There are sufficient £billions in excessive profits, subsidies and overheads to wipe out standing charges completely.

This was in reference to a loophole in regulations which meant the companies that own our energy infrastructure benefitted from an overestimation of borrowing costs.

Meanwhile of course, energy companies have also been raking in gargantuan profits too. Notably, since the energy crisis began, 20 energy giants from oil and gas majors, to suppliers, and companies controlling the grid, have made more than £484bn in profits.

The figure is based on a recent analysis by the End Fuel Poverty coalition – which the Canary has updated with since declared year end results. While some are still outstanding for 2024, companies including Shell, Equinor, Drax, and Cadent have made more £85bn of this last year alone.

Take three on telling Ofgem where to stick its standing charges

Ultimately, Fuel Poverty Action and Energy For All’s letter eviscerates the very basis of Ofgem’s argument that these are necessary costs in the first place – since customers are already paying far more for the unit price than it actually costs companies to produce energy:

We are generating a lot of electricity at less than 8p a unit but the Ofgem Price Cap is up again to 27p a unit plus 54p a day standing charges.

In short, the regulator has no intention of truly abolishing the standing charges. Rather, it simply plans to shift the costs onto the consumer elsewhere in their bill. Of course, this, on top of Ofgem raising the energy price cap again and costing households on average an extra £100 per year is another kick in teeth.

So, Fuel Poverty Action and Energy For All’s are urging as many as possible to once again flood its inbox and demand it ditch the standing charges for good. The public has until 20 March to send the letter to Ofgem, when it will close the consultation.

Of course, after ignoring multiple consultations calling for just that, it’s unlikely that this will make Ofgem meaningfully change its ways. After all, it has repeatedly shown itself less intent on protecting people from profiteering corporations, than it is at operating as a fundamental instrument propping up the energy privatisation racket.

However, with the campaign groups’ letter, the public can at least tell the sham regulator where to go on its latest corporate cronyist con.

Featured image via the Canary

By Hannah Sharland

This post was originally published on Canary.
March 15, 2025

Florida is now a solar superpower. Here’s how it happened.

Last May, Florida enacted a law deleting any reference to climate change from most of its state policies, a move Republican Governor Ron DeSantis described as “restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”

That hasn’t stopped the Sunshine State from becoming a national leader in solar power.

In a first, Florida vaulted past California last year in terms of new utility-scale solar capacity plugged into its grid. It built 3 gigawatts of large-scale solar in 2024, making it second only to Texas. And in the residential solar sector, Florida continued its longtime leadership streak. The state has ranked number two behind California for the most rooftop panels installed each year from 2019 through 2024, according to data the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie shared with Canary Media.

“We do expect Florida to continue as number two in 2025,” said Zoë Gaston, Wood Mackenzie’s principal U.S. distributed solar analyst.

Florida is expected to again be neck and neck with California for this year’s second-place spot in utility-scale solar installations, said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, Wood Mackenzie’s principal utility-scale solar analyst for North America.

Overall, the state receives about 8 percent of its electricity from solar, according to Solar Energy Industries Association data. The vast majority of its power comes from fossil gas.

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The state’s solar surge is the result of weather — both good and bad — and policies at the state and federal level that have made panels cheaper and easier to build, advocates say.

“Obviously in Florida, sunshine is extremely abundant,” said Zachary Colletti, the executive director of the Florida chapter of Conservatives for Clean Energy. “We’ve got plenty of it.”

The state is also facing a growing number of extreme storms. Of the 94 billion-dollar weather disasters that federal data shows unfolded in Florida since 1980, 34 occurred in the last five years.

“Floridians have long understood that not only is solar good for your pocket, it’s also good for your home resilience,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of The CLEO Institute, a Miami-based nonprofit that advocates for climate action. “In the face of increasing extreme weather events, having access to reliable energy is a big motivator.”

The tax credits available under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, have also made buying panels cheaper than ever before, she said.

“A lot of people took advantage of that. I’m one of them,” Arditi-Rocha said. “As soon as I saw that the federal government was going to give me 30 percent back on my taxes, I decided to make the investment and got myself a solar system that I could pay back in seven years. It was a win-win proposition.”

But solar started growing in Florida long before Democrats passed the IRA in 2022, and that’s thanks to favorable state policies.

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Municipalities and counties have little say over power plants, giving the Florida Public Service Commission ultimate control over siting and permitting. Plus, solar plants with a capacity under 75 megawatts are exempt from review and permitting altogether under the Florida Power Plant Siting Act.

The latter policy in particular has made building solar farms easy and inexpensive for the state’s major utilities, said Leyva Martinez. Companies such as NextEra Energy–owned Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest electrical utility, have for years patched together gigawatts of solar with small farms.

“We’re seeing this wave of project installations at gigawatt scales, but if you look at what’s actually being built, it’s a small 74-megawatt [project] here or a 74.9-megawatt project there,” she said. “It’s just easier to permit in the state, and developers have realized that they can keep installations at this range and they don’t need to go through the longer process.”

The solar buildout has prompted some backlash in rural parts of the state. A bill Republican state Senator Keith Truenow filed last month proposes granting some additional local control over siting and permitting solar farms on agricultural land.

“You’re starting to see a lot more complaining about the abundance of solar installations in more rural areas,” Colletti said. The legislation, he said, “would add some hurdles and ultimately add costs” but “wouldn’t necessarily reverse the state’s preemption” of local permitting authorities.

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NextEra and Florida Power & Light did not respond to an email requesting comment. Nor did Truenow return a call.

While the bill is currently making its way through the Legislature, DeSantis previously vetoed legislation that threatened Florida’s solar buildout.

In 2022, the governor blocked a utility-backed bill to end the state’s net metering program, which pays homeowners with rooftop solar for sending extra electricity back to the grid during the day.

“The governor did the right thing by vetoing that bill that would have strangled net metering and a lot of the rooftop solar industry in Florida,” Colletti said. “I know Floridians are much better off for it because we are able to offset our costs very well and take more control and ownership over our households.”

A telephone survey conducted by the pollster Mason-Dixon in February 2022 found that among 625 registered Florida voters, 84 percent supported net metering, including 76 percent of self-identified Republicans.

“It’s not about left or right,” Arditi-Rocha said. “It’s about making sure we live up to our state’s name. In the Sunshine State, the future can be really sunny and bright if we continue to harness the power of the sun.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Florida is now a solar superpower. Here’s how it happened. on Mar 15, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Alexander C. Kaufman.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 14, 2025

The future of Gaza’s recovery may rely on solar power

The first time Majd Mashharawi left her native Gaza was in 2017, to visit Tokyo. Her flight landed late at night, and she was struck by the airport’s many glittering lights. Then when she got to the urban core, she was astonished. “This is the life people have outside Gaza?” she thought. “Why don’t we have this life?”

Growing up, Mashharawi had been accustomed to life with inconsistent power — as little as three hours a day. “It’s not easy to describe unless you live it,” she said. “Your life is completely messed up. Everything is controlled by others. Your life is controlled by when power is on and off.”

Last week, Israel cut off all electricity to the Gaza Strip in an effort to strengthen its hand against Hamas in ceasefire talks. But in fact, the two parties’ dysfunctional relationship around energy has a long history. In 2007, after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, Israel established a land and sea blockade. This included electricity: Israel came to control 10 power lines running into Gaza, as well as the diesel fuel needed to run its one power plant. The blockade also gave Israel gatekeeping power over any materials — cement, steel, batteries — needed for domestic infrastructure, if Israeli authorities judged they could help militants.

Israel’s security establishment thought this hammerlock over Gazan energy meant leverage over Hamas, said Elai Rettig, a lecturer in energy politics at Bar-Ilan University. As for Hamas, many Gazans felt the group was more interested in its crusade against Israel than addressing public works.

For the people of Gaza, the conflict meant energy poverty. The Strip’s combined power resources could at best meet a quarter to a third of demand. This translated to daily power outages averaging 12 to 16 hours a day. Even worse, Mashharawi said, the outages were unpredictable — whenever the power flicked on, you had to scramble. This maddening unreliability landed especially hard on women, who had to jam all their chores into these fleeting windows of opportunity.

But over the last decade, as solar prices tumbled worldwide, more Israeli leaders started thinking that getting solar into Gaza had a strategic benefit. Gaza’s energy dependence wasn’t cheap. Years of Palestinian counterparties failing to pay Gaza’s power bill — for financial and political reasons — had by 2023 racked up a debt to Israel of 2 billion shekels, about $500 million.

In 2016 and 2017, Israel approved about 100,000 solar panels to enter Gaza, according to researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Satellite imagery soon showed solar arrays sprouting on thousands of buildings across the Gaza Strip, especially in crowded areas like refugee camps.

Around the time of Mashhawawi’s trip to Tokyo, she’d been working to start a company that manufactured Gaza’s war rubble into bricks. But her production lines were being constantly kneecapped by the start-stop of the grid. It occurred to her that unreliable power was not just a burden in households, like the one she grew up in. Thousands of businesses across Gaza — restaurants, workshops, bakeries — yearned for a source of energy more reliable than what they had. Mashharawi decided to get into the energy business.

She started Sunbox, a social enterprise promoting solar power, in 2017, working doggedly with Israeli authorities to get the equipment approved. She started by selling small arrays — 1 kilowatt and up, about enough to power a home with a small fridge — to families. She soon helped supply bigger projects. Sunbox equipped 20 small desalination plants, the engines of Gazan water production, with solar. It set up solar-charged streetlights so girls could feel more confident walking to school in the wee hours.

Large international organizations like the World Bank and U.N. were also getting in the game, decking hospitals and schools in solar. A 7-megawatt system, partly financed by the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, got bolted onto the Gaza Industrial Estate, a manufacturing complex. The IFC said the smoother power supply made it possible to expand output and hire workers.

It was a renewable revolution born of political dysfunction. The total number of solar arrays in the Gaza Strip vaulted from about a dozen in 2012 to 8,760 in 2019, mostly in the form of small rooftop systems. The extraordinary growth made the Occupied Palestinian Territories one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets in the world. By 2023, solar represented 25-40 percent of daytime power generation on the ragged Gazan grid, Rettig, of Bar-Ilan University, estimated.

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Then came October 7, 2023. Mashharawi was abroad at the time on business travel. She spent the first two months of the war calling in favors and trying to get her family to Egypt. Meanwhile, Sunbox’s offices and warehouses were destroyed. Mashharawi is mourning the loss of a dear coworker, Mahmoud Abushawish, who she said was venturing north to help a school set up solar — and find some candy for the kids.

Israel’s military assault on Gaza has taken at least 48,000 lives and left its infrastructure in tatters. In February an interim assessment, led by the World Bank, estimated $53 billion in reconstruction needs. It said that 80 percent of Gaza’s power infrastructure is wrecked and that Gazans have experienced a “near-total blackout” since the start of the war. Because Gaza’s water supplies depend on energy to pump and purify it, availability has fallen to sub-critical levels. “There is no water and no electricity. It is stunning just how much damage occurred there,” Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, told Axios after visiting the territory in January.

A ceasefire signed in January, which has been roughly observed even as its first phase expired March 1, has paused the bombing for now. But talks to end the war haven’t gained traction, and many sense that Israel’s ultra-right-wing government, emboldened by Trump’s return, wants to resume fighting. Meanwhile, today most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people live in desperate conditions in displacement camps and other makeshift shelters, often exposed to the elements and possessing minimal access to basic services. Humanitarian groups are begging Israel and the international community to preserve the ceasefire and rush aid to improve conditions at these camps — hopefully, as a precursor to reconstruction.

With Hamas weakened, world powers are deciding the future of Gaza. In February, Trump whimsically proposed to empty Gaza of Palestinians and redevelop it as a luxury riviera. The idea won plaudits from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and categorical rejection by America’s Arab and Western allies. Trump’s vision is out of step with the majority of governments and experts who think that the reconstruction of Gaza can, and should, be done in a way that empowers Palestinians to live better lives on their land, without posing a threat to Israel.

Energy access is minimal in Gaza today. But solar has become one of the few ways to get it. About half of the electrons Gazans are using today come from solar power, according to a December estimate by the Shelter Cluster, a group that coordinates among aid organizations working in Gaza. The other half is coming from diesel, the customary fuel for post-disaster scenarios, but aid groups say Israel is withholding the necessary supplies.

With virtually no new hardware getting in, Gazans have created an internal economy for used cleantech. Solar units and their peripherals are being ripped from roofs, salvaged from rubble, and sold on Facebook. In the many camps of internally displaced people now dotting the strip, you’ll see solar panels leaning against walls and chairs — facing the sun. Some serve commercial ends. “You can find a guy with one panel, and a table, and his business is actually to charge cell phones and to charge batteries,” said one 55-year-old Gazan whose family has been displaced several times during the war.

The aid groups serving these encampments are hoping the most violent stage of the war is past and that they can switch to establishing basic services: food, water, shelter and critical health care. With diesel supplies scant, some are trying to import solar-powered gear instead. The U.N. Development Programme wants to deploy 1,100 prefab housing units, each equipped with a kilowatt of solar and rudimentary plumbing, as part of a $27 million program. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that setting up off-grid photovoltaic systems is crucial to restoring agricultural activities like irrigation and cold storage.

Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza, a coalition of Palestinian, Israeli, and international NGOs, is supporting Palestinian-run IDP camps with 12,000 people in the south of Gaza with goods and equipment. The group aspires to set up a suite of solar-powered services — electricity, wastewater treatment, even units that produce drinking water from the air — to make them self-sufficient, dignified places to live during reconstruction, whenever that should begin. But in actuality, only a bit of traditional equipment got in before the ceasefire, and all equipment entries have stopped since then, said David Lehrer, a co-leader of the initiative.

Though the war isn’t formally over, many Gazans are returning to their homes, or the places their homes once stood. Some are beginning the early work of clearing rubble and laying to rest the bodies they find — a glimpse of the immense mourning that lies ahead.

As for the longer term, powerful parties are already competing to advance their respective visions of reconstruction. This month, Egypt, along with the 21 other members of the Arab League, issued a plan meant to counter Trump’s “riviera” concept. It proposes building 2,500 megawatts of power generation — about 20 times what Gaza had before the war — including solar, wind, and fossil-fuel generation. They’re not alone in envisioning Gaza as a renewable-energy powerhouse. The Palestinian Authority, which hopes to replace Hamas as Gaza’s ruling body, is developing a master plan of infrastructural priorities to be finalized with the World Bank, European Union, U.N., and Arab States. Wael Zakout, the Authority’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, has said solar and wind farms across Gaza could make it “the first region in the world to reach zero carbon emissions.”

Another idea that’s been mooted — one that Trump endorsed in his first term — is to build a solar farm in the sun-blasted deserts of the Sinai, just across Gaza’s southern border. Proponents say this has twin benefits: It frees up land in Gaza for other uses, and because it’s in Egypt, Israel’s not likely to target it.

But renewable energy won’t be the only resource considered for the repowering of Gaza. A modestly sized natural gas field was discovered offshore of Gaza in 2000. Political and economic conditions kept it from being developed, but the U.S., Egypt, and Israel have described it as an untapped energy reserve for Gaza. In November 2023, Amos Hochstein, a Middle East envoy for President Joe Biden and a former energy executive, said “as soon as we get to the day after and this horrible war ends, there are companies willing to develop those fields.” Supporters say gas-fired electricity would bolster Gaza’s overall energy supply and enable major new industrial infrastructure, like desalination plants and wastewater treatment, that would improve everyday life.

Josef Abramowitz, an Israeli-American solar developer who’s worked with Palestinian partners before, thinks the emphasis on large projects loses the decentralized character that has proven the most successful in Gaza. “The story of Gaza is: big projects that don’t get done,” he said.

Abramowitz’s favored model is minigrids: localized networks of solar panels and battery storage, which he said can supply round-the-clock energy at a fraction the cost of gas-fired generation. They’re flexible, sustainable, and — important in the Gazan context of blockade, frequent war, and poor governance — feasible with or without a grand resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As for Mashharawi, she said her vision for reconstruction involves something a lot more basic than energy: peace and quiet.

“One to two years from now, where are we going?” she said. “We don’t want to keep building and rebuilding things that are destroyed.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The future of Gaza’s recovery may rely on solar power on Mar 14, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 12, 2025

Energy Secretary Wright Wants To ‘Play A Role In Reversing’ Climate Policies

United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Monday delivered a blunt critique of the energy and climate policies of the Biden administration to a group of oil and gas executives, promising a “180 degree pivot.”

The former fracking executive is fully behind President Donald Trump’s plan to expand fossil fuel production in the U.S. while doing away with federal policies to mitigate global heating.

“I wanted to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy,” Wright said during the kickoff to the CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, as The New York Times reported.

The post Energy Secretary Wright Wants To ‘Play A Role In Reversing’ Climate Policies appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
March 12, 2025

New York approved a major gas pipeline expansion. What does it mean for its climate goals?

The United States is facing a pivotal moment in its fight against climate change as President Donald Trump carries out plans to roll back those efforts.

In 2019, when New York passed its landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA, it became a shining example of national climate action. The law established a roadmap for the state to mostly phase out planet-warming fossil fuels like gas by 2050, and transition to clean energy instead.

But 96 percent of the downstate region is still powered by fossil fuels, through pipelines for natural gas. In total, only about 29 percent of the Empire State’s electricity comes from renewable sources.

Since the CLCPA was passed, gas suppliers have made 10 attempts to increase the flow of gas across the state. But none secured New York permits to move forward, until now.

On February 7, the state greenlit an enhancement project by Iroquois Pipeline Company, which will boost the capacity of four facilities that compress gas to push more of it into the city.

Athens resident Lisa Thomas at the New York State Capitol last December telling lawmakers that the Iroquois Pipeline’s enhancement project isn’t welcome.
Adi Talwar/City Limits

The approval of Iroquois’ project, which utility companies argue is needed to heat New Yorkers’ homes in the coldest months, amps up planet-warming pollution—and signals that the state’s commitment to reaching its climate goals is faltering, critics say.

The Iroquois project alone could generate $3.78 billion in climate damages through 2050 and add the equivalent of 186,000 passenger cars to the road in planet-warming gasses. It will also spew pollution into communities like Athens, a town in southeast central New York that filmmaker Lisa Thomas calls home.

‘Right under your nose’

When Lisa Thomas first moved out of New York City’s bustling concrete jungle 23 years ago for the quiet town of Athens, she was looking for a peaceful place to settle down. She believed her new 16-acre property, surrounded by trees, was it.

“I wanted to have a place that I could call home and feel safe in. But somehow now it feels like that’s in jeopardy,” Thomas said.

Nearly two years ago, Thomas learned that the multinational gas supplier, the Iroquois Pipeline Company, had plans to more than double the capacity of a compressor station a few miles down the road from her home.

Compressor stations, which make gas smaller so more of it can get pushed through the system, are widely regarded as health hazards. They spew air pollutants that can contribute to preterm births, asthma, heart disease, strokes, and a shorter lifespan, environmentalists say. And emissions released by compressor stations in New York contained 39 cancer inducing chemicals, one study found.

“A lot of times the most dangerous things are actually happening right under your nose, and you don’t even know it,” Thomas said.

Athens isn’t the only town where Iroquois was granted air permits from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to enhance its infrastructure. Another compressor station in Dover, a town in the southeastern tip of the state, will get a boost too. And the company hopes to do the same in two facilities in Connecticut, although permits for those are yet to be issued.

The venture, known as the ExC Project, aims to push an extra 125 million cubic feet per day of gas into New York City. To make it happen, 48,000 horsepower of new compression will be added to the four compressor stations along Iroquois’ pipeline, which starts in Canada and stretches all the way to the Big Apple.

Map of Gas New York’s gas pipeline projects developed by Patrick Spauster. Patrick Spauster

Until ExC got New York’s seal of approval, the Empire State had denied all post-CLCPA requests from fossil fuel suppliers to secure permits for expansion.

The move signals that the state’s commitment to phasing out fossil fuels is waning, environmentalists say. Deadlines laid out by the climate act, to have 70 percent of the state’s energy come from renewable sources by 2030, have already been pushed back by three years.

Utility companies National Grid and Con Edison argue their New York City customers need the added supply, especially in the colder months. “Issuing the permits for the Iroquois ExC project is essential for maintaining a safe, adequate, and reliable gas supply for downstate New York customers,” DEC agreed in an email.

But the approval tightens the grip of dependency on fossil fuels in a state where gas-fired power plants generated twice as much electricity as any other fuel source in 2023. It will also increase pollution in towns like Athens, critics say, and add to the national carbon footprint at a time when President Trump is scaling back efforts to fight climate change.

The project has the potential to generate $3.78 billion in climate damages over the next 25 years, according to an analysis put together by the Environmental Protection Agency when Iroquois sought federal permits for the venture.

“[New York’s administration] is leaning into the wave of conservative policy. It just feels really tone deaf to what most New Yorkers actually care about and want,” said Emily Skydel, New York Hudson Valley senior organizer at Food & Water Watch.

‘A political problem’

When New York first passed the Climate Act, the state’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions appeared unwavering. Government officials were shutting down bids to bring more gas into the state left and right.

Gas supplier Williams Transco, which sought to build a massive pipeline stretching from Pennsylvania to New York City’s Rockaways, had its third request for a state permit rejected in the spring of 2020. A year later, the state also denied attempts by Danskammer and Astoria Gas Turbine Power to turn peaker plants—used only during times of peak demand for gas—into full service facilities.

Each time, DEC gave the same reason for the rejections: the projects generated too many planet-warming emissions, making them “inconsistent with the requirements of the Climate Act.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo signs New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in July of 2019. Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

But since then, officials’ tone has changed.

In an interview last summer, Governor Kathy Hochul said that New York will probably “miss” hitting the goals set by the CLCPA “by a couple of years.”

“The goals are still worthy. But we have to think about the collateral damage of all of our major decisions,” Hochul said, citing concerns about the transition to clean energy still being too costly for consumers. “You either mitigate them or you have to rethink them.”

Seven months later, Iroquois’ compressor station expansion was approved even though the amount of climate pollution the project is set to emit exceeds limits the DEC previously considered inconsistent with the climate law.

Astoria Gas Turbine Power’s buildout, for instance, was set to launch 723,872 tons of the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere per year. The amount, the DEC said at the time, was “substantial” as it would “interfere” with achieving the statewide emission limits set for 2030.

Meanwhile, Iroquois’ ExC project, which is projected to generate 859,057 tons of CO2e annually, did get DEC’s stamp of approval. The amount is comparable to adding 186,000 passenger cars to the road, the environmental group Sierra Club says.

As a condition for issuing the permits, however, DEC said Iroquois is required to invest $5 million in “mitigation efforts” to “minimize emissions.” That will include investing in electric vehicle charging stations or establishing a program for heat pumps, a clean electric solution to heating homes.

But efforts like these just don’t add up, environmentalists argue.

Protestors at New York’s Capitol last December urging the State to stop Iroquois’ enhancement project. Adi Talwar/City Limits

“Green lighting projects that have a tiny marginal impact in lowering emissions are not good enough,” said Josh Berman, an attorney at Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program.

Berman points out that the state is only marginally below 1990 greenhouse gas emissions levels, even though the climate act says it’s supposed to be 40 percent below those levels in just five years.

“We need to be doing things that are fundamentally lower-emitting and much cleaner,” Berman added.

Just 29 percent of the state’s electricity currently comes from renewable energy like solar and wind, a far cry from the goal set by the climate law, which calls for 70 percent by 2030. A state report issued last year admitted that the Empire State would probably only hit this goal by 2033.

“I think that it’s very much down to a failure of leadership by Governor [Kathy Hochul] to take seriously our legal mandate to hit our climate goals,” said Michael Paulson, co-chair of the Public Power Coalition, an environmental group that supports the shift to renewable energy.

“It is a political problem and a problem of leadership,” Paulson added.

The governor did sign legislation last year that would force big oil companies to pay for climate change destruction, and banned fracking for gas with a new technique that uses carbon dioxide. Plus she invested $1 billion “in clean energy projects in this year’s budget,” her office pointed out in an email.

“Governor Hochul has demonstrated a clear commitment to an affordable and reliable transition to a clean energy economy,” Hochul’s Deputy Communications Director Paul DeMichele added.

Inconsistent funding, long timelines for the completion of large scale renewable energy ventures and cancelled contracts have delayed the shift to renewables, the state comptroller’s office said.

In the meantime, the gas industry has quietly sought to expand by building out several existing facilities.

Map of proposed compressor station build outs in New York State. Patrick Spauster

More gas is already being funneled into New York’s Westchester County thanks to compressor station expansions in neighboring states that concluded last year. The plan, carried out by the Tennessee Gas Pipeline company, brought a new compressor station and the enhancement of two others to New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Within the last five years, pipeline companies have proposed eight compressor station buildouts to bring more gas into New York, a City Limits review of public filings show. Of those, three were approved by neighboring states.

“This is a strategy used by the fossil fuel industry to expand their infrastructure in a way that makes it look like they’re not really doing it,” Skydel from Food & Water Watch said.

“What people need to understand is that this is still adding gas into the system. It’s increasing air pollution and it’s still doing serious harm to our climate, to our health.”

A necessary evil?

For the nearly 4,000 people who live in the village of Athens, the approval of the Iroquois pipeline’s ExC project is not welcome news, Mayor Amy Serrago says.

“For Athens there’s really no community benefit. It’s all downsides,” argued Serrago.

Environmentalists say compressor stations, which operate on high pressure to boost more gas through the system, are accident-prone facilities. Weymouth compressor station in Massachusetts is a case in point, as the facility has reportedly had at least three unplanned leaks.

Athens is already deemed a disadvantaged community under the state’s climate criteria because it faces economic, health and environmental challenges; the town is home to large scale industrial activity like the Athens Generating plant.

“We need to find another solution to [New York’s] energy problem. I know it’s not an easy overnight fix, but we can’t keep piling these things onto our rural communities,” Serrago said.

Protestors at New York’s Capitol last December urging the State to stop Iroquois’ enhancement project. Adi Talwar/City Limits

The Iroquois Pipeline Company told DEC that the project “will not disproportionately burden” Athens or “negatively impact human health.”

“The proposed project would not have a significant adverse impact on the environment or on individuals living in the vicinity of the project facilities, including environmental justice communities,” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) agreed during proceedings that greenlit the project on the federal level.

But when it comes to the environment, the Iroquois Pipeline Company doesn’t have the best track record. In the spring of 1996, it pleaded guilty to four felonies for violating federal environmental laws. (Ironically, the company carries the name of the group of six Native American nations that were displaced from their territories in the 17th and 18th centuries.)

Still, fears that there won’t be enough renewable energy to heat the homes of New York residents permeate, especially in the New York City region, where dependence on fossil fuels has increased over the last five years.

In 2021, the state shut down the nuclear power plant at Indian Point, long regarded by some as an environmental health hazard. But it also supplied a large chunk of carbon-free electricity downstate.

After it began ceasing operations in the spring of 2020, downstate fossil fuel generation increased from 69 percent in 2019 to 96 percent in 2022, according to New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) reports analyzed by electrical engineer Keith Schue. Schue is part of the New York Energy and Climate Advocates, which champions the use of nuclear energy.

A slight increase in renewable energy reduced downstate dependency on fossil fuels to 94 percent last year, according to NYISO’s most recent report. But that’s still falling short of what’s needed to move off gas.

Governor Hochul briefs New Yorkers in Queens about Winter Storm Elliott.
Darren McGee/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

For Schue, the state is caught in a conundrum: while it wants to support the shift away from fossil fuels, it doesn’t have enough clean energy to do it. So it’s forced to approve projects like Iroquois to keep electricity flowing.

“People want to demonize Governor Hochul right now about this decision. But I don’t think that’s fair because ultimately we can’t let the lights go out. You can’t let people not have energy in their homes. So she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Shue said.

Utility companies National Grid and Con Edison, which turn a profit by selling Iroquois’ gas to New York City residents, also say more capacity is needed.

The added supply will “significantly increase deliverability into capacity-constrained downstate New York,” National Grid said in a document issued to FERC. The utility “expects its demand growth to remain steady in coming years due to population and economic growth as well as continued oil-to-gas conversions.” Their priority, the company said in an email, is ensuring “customers have access to the energy they need.”

Con Edison agreed, adding that it needs the boost in capacity to “meet our customers’ demand on the coldest expected winter day.” A spokesperson also noted that “the approval of these permits is a step toward enhancing the reliability of our gas supply from interstate pipelines.”

The Department of Public Service (DPS), the agency that oversees utilities in New York, said in an email that it was “firmly committed” to transitioning to “cleaner and renewable energy sources.”

But it also painted the project as a necessary evil. The agency pointed out that New York came close to a “wide scale gas outage” in December of 2022, when Winter Storm Elliott led to a sudden reliance on electric generators, spiking demand for gas.

“This project is strictly about solving a safety and reliability issue on the system as it currently exists. The safety of New Yorkers during extreme cold weather is paramount, and we cannot compromise on the reliability of the state’s utility systems,” DPS said in an emailed statement.

‘Fear mongering’

Members of the environmental community, however, strongly disagree.

“One of the main tactics of the oil and gas industries is to fear monger with regards to public safety and the reliability of electricity,” said Niki Cross, an attorney at the nonprofit New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI).

“They point to scenarios like Winter Storm Elliott and say that we were close to having an emergency breakdown of the system. But in fact, we didn’t and those storms are less and less likely to happen because of the warming climate,” they added.

New York City, once considered a humid continental climate, was redefined five years ago as a humid subtropical climate zone by the National Climate Assessment.

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Plus, the amount of gas that utility companies National Grid and Con Edison say they need is based on unrealistic demand, environmentalists argue.

Both utilities use “65 Heating Degree Days” to measure how much energy is needed to heat buildings. This measure is equivalent to the temperature at Central Park reaching zero degrees over the course of an entire day. The last time that happened in New York was in 1934, experts say.

The forecasts, known as “design day demand,” are based on “extremely cold temperature conditions that occurred 90 years ago and have occurred only twice in the last 120 years,” Cross said.

A series of upcoming environmental laws are expected to further lessen New York’s need for fossil fuels. A state prohibition on the use of gas equipment in new construction takes effect in 2026 for new buildings of seven stories or less, and in 2029 for larger buildings. New York City’s own version of this law started last year. And starting this year, the city’s Local Law 97 will fine buildings larger than 25,000 square feet that fail to reduce their carbon emissions through energy efficiency upgrades.

Still, the state’s utility regulator, DPS, said that although these recent policies “reduced the overall growth of gas demand in New York City,” the demand for gas has “continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace” in a portion of ConEd and National Grid territory.

But a third party study commissioned by DPS itself begs to differ. After 2027, “no additional supply assets” like adding “additional capacity” to pipelines “will be required” to meet National Grid and ConEd’s “design day demands,” the 2023 report found.

“The question is: can you meet those design day goals with a portion of electrification? If you electrify 10 percent of [utility] customers, then you have 10 percent excess supply that you could use to cover greater demand during a winter peak,” said Michael Bloomberg, managing partner at the energy consulting firm Groundwork Data.

“You could do the same thing just through building efficiency. You don’t necessarily need to do it through added supply,” he argued.

Nationally, Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda promises to increase the use of fossil fuels, as government incentives and federal permits needed for clean energy initiatives have already begun to unravel.

The Trump administration paused new leases and halted new permits for projects that generate clean energy using offshore wind farms. And it threatened to revoke federal approval for New York’s congestion pricing program, a toll that encourages Manhattan commuters to swap their cars for less carbon-emitting public transit.

“In New York we’re going to be facing a lot of headwinds coming from the federal government,” said Daniel Zarrilli, former chief climate policy advisor at the New York City Mayor’s Office.

“State governments need to be as bold as they can at this moment,” he added. “And so I would hope that New York would be at the leading edge on that. But there’s a lot of pressure pushing the other way right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York approved a major gas pipeline expansion. What does it mean for its climate goals? on Mar 12, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 10, 2025

Efforts were underway to prevent CO2 pipeline leaks. The Trump administration quietly derailed them.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

Nearly five years after a pipeline spewed poison gas across a Mississippi town, federal regulators appeared ready in recent weeks to institute new safety rules aimed at preventing similar accidents across the U.S.’s fast-growing network of carbon dioxide pipelines.

But the proposed rules, unveiled five days before the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, were quietly derailed during the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term.

A federal pipeline safety official not authorized to speak publicly said the proposed rules were “withdrawn” in accordance with a January 20 executive order that freezes all pending regulations and initiates a review process by Trump’s newly appointed agency leaders. Putting the pipeline rules in further doubt is a February 19 executive order aimed at rooting out all regulations that are costly to “private parties” and impede economic development.

Trump’s choice to lead the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which proposed the rules, is Paul Roberti, an attorney strongly backed by pipeline and energy industry groups. Roberti, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, oversaw PHMSA’s safety enforcement during Trump’s first term, a time marked by fewer citations and smaller fines than the Obama and Biden administrations.

Pipeline safety advocates still hope to push the Trump administration to approve the rules, which they say are critically important for reducing the risks of potentially deadly accidents across a growing number of states.

“It’s not dead yet,” said Paul Blackburn, an energy policy advisor for the Bold Alliance, an environmental group that tracks pipeline development. “It can be brought back by Trump, and I think the Trump administration should be pressured to do that.”

The more than 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines in the U.S. are primarily used for enhanced oil recovery, a process that injects carbon dioxide into old oil reserves to squeeze out leftover deposits. Much of the current and predicted growth of the CO2 pipeline network is linked to the recent boom in carbon capture technologies, which allow industrial plants to store CO2 underground instead of releasing it into the air.

The CO2 pipeline network could top 66,000 miles — a thirteenfold increase — by 2050, according to a Princeton University-led study.

The Trump administration isn’t as supportive of carbon capture, but industry experts say growth will continue as companies try to meet state-level climate benchmarks.

While proponents say carbon capture will help address climate change, transporting pressurized CO2 comes with dangers, especially for rural stretches of the Midwest and Gulf Coast, where the network is concentrated.

CO2 can cause drowsiness, suffocation and sometimes death. Colorless, odorless, and heavier than air, carbon dioxide can travel undetected and at lethal concentrations over large distances.

The proposed rules would establish the first design, installation, and maintenance requirements for CO2 pipelines. Companies operating pipelines would need to provide training to local police and fire departments on how to respond to CO2 leaks, and emergency communication with the public would need to be improved.

Operators would be required to plan for gas releases that could harm people within 2 miles of a pipeline. The proposed rules show that PHMSA finally recognizes that the threats from CO2 pipelines are different from oil and natural gas pipelines, which can spill, burn, or explode but don’t usually imperil people miles away, said Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group.

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“These are relatively strong proposals,” he said. “Would these rules make CO2 pipelines completely safe? No. But it would modernize the pipelines.”

PHMSA currently has no specific standards for transporting CO2. Rules governing the CO2 pipeline network haven’t undergone significant review since 1991, according to the trust.

The proposed rules apply “lessons learned” from a 2020 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, PHMSA officials said in an announcement on January 15.

The rupture in the small community 30 miles northwest of Jackson forced about 200 Satartia residents to evacuate. Emergency responders found people passed out, disoriented, and struggling to breathe. At least 45 people were treated at nearby hospitals.

“I have learned firsthand from affected communities in Mississippi and across America why we need stronger CO2 pipeline safety standards,” then-PHMSA Deputy Administrator Tristan Brown, a Biden appointee, said in a statement on January 15. “These new requirements will be the strongest, most comprehensive standards for carbon dioxide transportation in the world and will set our nation on a safer path as we continue to address climate challenges.”

Accidental releases have occurred from CO2 pipelines 76 times since 2010, according to PHMSA data reviewed by Verite News. Of the more than 67,000 barrels of CO2 released over the past 15 years, the vast majority — about 54,000 barrels — came from pipelines owned by Exxon Mobil subsidiary Denbury Inc.

Denbury operates the 925-mile pipeline network that failed in Satartia and more recently in southwest Louisiana. Last April, a pipeline at a Denbury pump station near the Calcasieu Parish town of Sulphur ruptured, triggering road closures and a shelter-in-place advisory. Some residents reported feeling tired and light-headed, but local authorities reported no serious illnesses.

The pump station and pipeline weren’t equipped with alarms or other methods of alerting nearby residents when accidents occur.

Several Sulphur-area residents said they received no notice of the leak or became aware of it via Facebook posts more than an hour after the gas began to spread.

“There should have been alarms, and the whole community should have been notified,” Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer who lives near the station, told Verite in April. “I don’t trust the system we have at all.”

Unless the proposed rules are enacted, similar or worse accidents are likely, said Kenneth Clarkson, the trust’s communications director.

“In the absence of a rule, blatant regulatory shortfalls will remain, leaving the public fully exposed to the risks of CO2 pipelines,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Efforts were underway to prevent CO2 pipeline leaks. The Trump administration quietly derailed them. on Mar 10, 2025.
March 7, 2025

Russia Targets Ukraine’s Energy Sector In Massive Aerial Assault

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 7, 2025

Oil companies are dropping renewable goals — and more importantly, expanding fossil fuels

Last week, British Petroleum announced that it was slashing more than $5 billion in planned green energy investments. It was a marked departure from the early 2000s, when the oil giant branded itself as “beyond petroleum,” and even 2020, when the company targeted a 20-fold increase in its renewables portfolio.

“Today, we have fundamentally reset BP’s strategy,” said BP’s CEO, Murray Auchincloss, as part of the most recent announcement. “This is a reset BP, with an unwavering focus on growing long-term shareholder value.”

BP isn’t the only oil giant rolling back its climate commitments. Shell and Norway’s state-controlled Equinor have also made similar moves recently. But, while the news has caught headlines, experts say that the moves will have little impact on the larger renewables industry — and that, from a climate perspective, the companies’ proposed increase in fossil fuel production is much more alarming.

“I don’t see the watering down of renewables targets as particularly significant. The oil and gas sector accounts for a negligible share of clean energy investment,” wrote Rich Collett-White, an analyst at Carbon Tracker, a nonprofit think tank researching the impact of climate change on financial markets, in an email. According to the International Energy Agency, the sector accounts for only 1 percent of the overall industry.

“Clean energy investment is still increasing globally — it’s just not coming from the oil and gas sector,” said White. “The changes they’re making to production targets are more significant.”

Read Next

Greenhushing, explained: Why companies have stopped talking about their climate pledges

Kate Yoder

At the same time that BP cut its renewables portfolio, it said it was going to invest $10 billion more in oil and gas. The company is now aiming to produce 2.4 million barrels per day of fossil fuels by 2030, which is a 60 percent jump from its previous target. That 900,000 barrel difference amounts to about 387,000 more metric tons of carbon dioxide each day — which is equivalent to around 90,000 gas-powered cars operating for a year.

“Even before these renewable rollbacks, almost all the oil majors were locked in to new oil and gas production,” explained Kelly Trout, research director at Oil Change International, an advocacy organization aiming to facilitate a just transition to clean energy. A report from the organization last May found that six of the eight largest oil companies had explicit goals to increase oil and gas production. Since then, Trout says that has grown to seven companies, with Shell being the only exception.

These commitments come at a time when the oil market already shows signs of saturation. Of the 2,206 active leases in the Gulf, only a fifth are producing oil, according to records from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates offshore drilling. White says that, climate aside, Carbon Tracker “would caution against locking in new, high-capex long-cycle developments that would need high oil/gas prices to be competitive.”

Nonetheless, President Donald Trump has urged the United States to “drill, baby, drill.” In the first month since retaking office, his administration has declared an “energy emergency” aimed at enabling the government to ramp up fossil fuel extraction, reversed a moratorium on liquefied natural gas exports, and installed a former natural gas executive as the head of the Department of Energy. At the same time, Trump has also frozen much of the money from President Joe Biden’s landmark climate bills, the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

Read Next

Oil companies don’t want to be known for oil anymore

Emily Pontecorvo

“Trump and the current administration is giving these companies a pass to keep their polluting practices,” said Mahyar Sorour, the director of the Beyond Fossil Fuels Policy program at the Sierra Club. “It is no surprise that these companies are following [Trump’s] lead.”

In BP’s announcement, the company is similarly distancing itself from its previous commitments to clean energy. “Our optimism for a fast [energy] transition was misplaced,” said Auchincloss. “We went too far, too fast.“

Rollbacks like BP’s are in some ways laying bare what activists have long argued: The commitments were insincere from the start. “Many of these tactics have been simple greenwashing,” said Sorour, adding that momentum will continue regardless. “We are well on our way to a green energy transition.”

Now that oil companies have made their intentions clear, Trout is watching whether investors and governments will respond with any pushback against the production increases. Meaningful reductions in planet warming emissions, she said, can’t happen without phasing out fossil fuels — a future oil companies clearly aren’t envisioning.

“We’re not going to solve the climate crisis simply by adding renewable energy on top of fossil fuels,” she said. “It’s a truth telling moment.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oil companies are dropping renewable goals — and more importantly, expanding fossil fuels on Mar 7, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 6, 2025

Alberta continues to depend on dirty money for economic well-being

Four decades ago, Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed came to power, with the promise to make the province’s economy less dependent on the fluctuating price of oil and gas. Yet decades on, the province’s finances are still heavily reliant on royalties from bitumen sales to the United States, and natural gas sales across Canada and around the world.

Progress has been made. While it was a very different era to the one we find ourselves in today, Lougheed’s first few budgets were completely dependent on oil revenue, which at one point made up nearly 80 per cent of the income for Alberta’s provincial coffers.

In 2024 that number was closer to 27 per cent.

The 2025 budget introduced by Alberta finance minister Nate Horner on February 27th pegs the forecasted revenue from oil and gas at about 28 per cent, though they are cautiously budgeting it to be a few points lower.

In the last decade, the revenue share of Alberta’s budget which depends on oil and gas royalties has been as low as eight, and as high as 30 per cent.

What this means is that one out of every four dollars spent on health care, education, and critical social services depends on the oil and gas sector having a very good year. The financial well-being of the petroleum industry is so crucial to Alberta’s budget that a special Economic Outlook section focused almost entirely on the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude (pegged at $68/barrel).

I expect that by now you see the flaw in this logic. The American market is no longer a reliable purchaser of our crude oil. America is now the largest energy producer in the world and has high hopes for being energy-independent in the coming years. While many of the country’s refineries have been converted to process the heavy crude we sell them, only money is preventing them from re-tooling once again to manage the lighter oil produced throughout much of the US’s portion of the Western Sedimentary Basin.

A quick scan across the rest of the world doesn’t demonstrate much hope that our heavy, carbon-intensive, and very expensive crude oil is welcome anywhere else. The Trans Mountain Pipeline, heralded as a means of selling our goop to Southeast Asia and China, today sends most of its product to California. Just ten per cent went to China last year.

Europe doesn’t want our dirty oil. They are at the forefront of the energy transition. While natural gas might have been on their shopping list at the beginning of the war in the Ukraine, that ship has now sailed.

The reality is, within the next five years, it is projected that the world will be consuming 1,000,000 barrels of oil a day less every single year, as the energy transition kicks into high gear nearly everywhere else in the world except Alberta.

We’re stuck. We need the revenue that oil and gas bring to keep our schools and hospitals open, but we can no longer count on our number one market for our products, and we haven’t done nearly enough to diversify our energy economy. We have created major barriers to new renewable energy development to meet our domestic needs, but we continue to put nearly all of our eggs in the petroleum energy basket when it comes to our export market.

It is said that the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Alberta’s 2025-26 budget shows no signs of acknowledging that such a problem exists. A $4 billion contingency fund is in place to offset the impacts of American tariffs, but there is no complementary fund set up to invest in diversification so we’re less dependent on the US in the first place.

Why is it so hard for Alberta to have this conversation?

There are solutions, and Alberta has dabbled in them: the high-tech sector, health care research, international education, manufacturing, petrochemicals, agriculture, and tourism, to name a few. None of these on their own can supplant the massive impact that petroleum has on Alberta’s economy. It’s almost as if the province needs to have a group chat about what we want our economy to look like in a post-petroleum world. We should do that before it’s too late.

The post Alberta continues to depend on dirty money for economic well-being appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 5, 2025

Utilities may soon pay you to help support a greener grid

Every month you pay an electricity bill, because there’s no choice if you want to keep the lights on. The power flows in one direction. But soon, utilities might desperately need something from you: electricity.

A system increasingly loaded with wind and solar will require customers to send power back into the system. If the traditional grid centralized generation at power plants, experts believe the system of tomorrow will be more distributed, with power coming from what they call the “grid edge” — household batteries, electric cars, and other gadgets whose relationship with the grid has been one way. More people, for example, are installing solar panels on their roofs backed up with home batteries. When electricity demand increases, a utility can draw power from those homes as a vast network of backup energy.

The big question is how to choreograph that electrical ballet — millions of different devices at the grid edge, owned by millions of different customers, that all need to talk to the utility’s systems. To address that problem, a team of researchers from several universities and national labs developed an algorithm for running a “local electricity market,” in which ratepayers would be compensated for allowing their devices to provide backup power to a utility. Their paper, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described how the algorithm could coordinate so many sources of power — and then put the system to the test. “When you have numbers of that magnitude, then it becomes very difficult for one centralized entity to keep tabs on everything that’s going on,” said Anu Annaswamy, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper’s co-author. “Things need to become more distributed, and that is something the local electricity market can facilitate.”

At the moment, utilities respond to a surge in demand for electricity by spinning up more generation at power plants running on fossil fuels. But they can’t necessarily do that with renewables, since the sun might not be shining, or the wind blowing. So as grids increasingly depend on clean energy, they’re getting more flexible: Giant banks of lithium-ion batteries, for instance, can store that juice for later use.

Yet grids will need even more flexibility in the event of a cyberattack or outage. If a hacker compromises a brand of smart thermostat to increase the load on a bunch of AC units at once, that could crash the grid by driving demand above available supply. With this sort of local electricity market imagined in the paper, a utility would call on other batteries in the network to boost supply, stabilizing the grid. At the same time, electric water heaters and heat pumps for climate control could wind down, reducing demand. “In that sense, there’s not necessarily a fundamental difference between a battery and a smart device like a water heater, in terms of being able to provide the support to the grid,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Along with this demand reduction, drawing power from devices along the grid edge would provide additional support. In testing out cyberattack scenarios and sustained inclement weather that reduces solar energy, the researchers found that the algorithm was able to restabilize the grid every time. The algorithm also provides a way to set the rates paid to households for their participation. That would depend on a number of factors such as time of day, location of the household, and the overall demand. “Consumers who provide flexibility are explicitly being compensated for that, rather than just people doing it voluntarily,” said Vineet J. Nair, a Ph.D. student at MIT and lead author of the paper. “That kind of compensation is a way to incentivize customers.”

Utilities are already experimenting with these sorts of compensation programs, though on a much smaller scale. Electric buses in Oakland, California, for instance, are sending energy back to the grid when they’re not ferrying kids around. Utilities are also contracting with households to use their large home batteries, like Tesla’s Powerwall, as virtual power plants.

Building such systems is relatively easy, because homes with all their heat pumps and batteries are already hooked into the system, said Anna Lafoyiannis, senior team lead for transmission operations and planning at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. By contrast, connecting a solar and battery farm to the grid takes years of planning, permitting, and construction. “Distributed resources can be deployed really quickly on the grid,” she said. “When I look at flexibility, the time scale matters.”

All these energy sources at the grid edge, combined with large battery farms operated by the utility, are dismantling the myth that renewables aren’t reliable enough to provide power on their own. One day, you might even get paid to help bury that myth for good.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities may soon pay you to help support a greener grid on Mar 5, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 5, 2025

How Trump’s trade war could impact U.S. electricity prices — and state climate plans

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump initiated a trade war with Canada and Mexico, America’s two largest trading partners. Following through on weeks of threats, he imposed 25 percent tariffs on imported goods from Mexico and Canada and a lower 10 percent tariff on imports of Canadian energy resources.

Canada and Mexico’s leaders quickly struck back. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled an immediate 25 percent tariff on $20.5 billion worth of goods from the United States and promised to extend the tax to another $85 billion in products in late March. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced she also planned to unveil retaliatory tariffs this coming Sunday.

Trump’s tariffs, which are widely expected to raise prices for U.S. consumers, are also poised to upend the American electricity market. All U.S. power grids except for Texas’s have some level of interconnection with grids in Canada, the largest energy supplier to the U.S.

Historically, the U.S. has imported roughly twice as much power from Canada as it exports there, though that ratio has started to shift in recent years as climate change-driven drought has slowed the output of hydroelectricity in provinces like Quebec and Ontario. Some 98 percent of America’s natural gas imports, and 93 percent of its electricity imports — much of that from hydroelectric dams — come from Canada.

America’s reliance on Canadian power is not evenly distributed. Northern energy grids are generally more reliant on Canada’s energy resources than southern grids due to their geographic proximity to Canada. States like New York and Minnesota have also entered into energy market agreements with Canadian provinces to receive their hydroelectricity in order to meet ambitious and rapidly-approaching climate change goals.

From Canada’s perspective, withholding or taxing energy exports to the U.S. is an effective bargaining chip — perhaps one of the country’s most powerful. “I see energy as Canada’s queen in this game of chess,” Andrew Furey, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, said in January, when Trump had not yet followed through on his threat of Canadian tariffs. Furey’s province is one of five that supplies the U.S. with hydropower.

Niagara Falls on the Canada-U.S. border is a major source of hydroelectric power for the region.
John Moore/Getty Images

On the evening before the tariffs took effect, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, threatened to cut off energy exports to the United States full stop “with a smile” if Trump continues to target Canada with tariffs.

On Tuesday, Ford announced a 25 percent export tax on power Ontario ships via transmission lines to 1.5 million homes in three states — Michigan, Minnesota, and New York — and said a full export ban was still on the table.

All three states affected by Ontario’s export tax have climate targets on the books that rely in some measure on hydroelectric power. Minnesota, Michigan, and New York all aim to achieve clean electricity grids by 2040. Michigan is relying in large part on its own hydroelectric facilities, but Minnesota and New York are to varying degrees dependent on Canada to reach their targets.

Experts told Grist it’s too soon to say what Trump’s tariffs, and Ford’s retaliatory measures, mean for these states’ climate goals — and their residents. “When you’re adding unnecessary friction into the market, of course you’re going to see price increases,” said Daniel A. Zarrilli, who served as chief climate policy advisor to former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. “Tariffs are going to flow to the consumer, either directly or indirectly.” Zarrilli noted that it’s unclear what those price hikes might look like, and who — ratepayers, utilities, or some combination of actors — will shoulder them.

The trade war may be felt especially acutely in New York, where developers are extending a transmission line from Quebec all the way to Queens in order to pump much-needed hydroelectric power into New York City. Once the Champlain Hudson Power Express is operational in 2026, New York City is guaranteed hydroelectric power during the summer months. It is not, however, guaranteed that reliable power during the winter.

As the state has electrified its power grid, energy demand has been increasing during the cold weather months. Now New York power grid operators are preparing for demand during the winter to double over the next 30 years. But whether the state gets the hydropower it needs to provide reliable, renewable power during that peak demand now depends on how the trade war plays out.
“The fallout could be actually catastrophic,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director at the nonprofit Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which has helped push New York City to adopt a climate plan that mirrors the state’s. “It defies logic.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s trade war could impact U.S. electricity prices — and state climate plans on Mar 4, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
March 2, 2025

Indonesia’s bullion banks, new mining policies pose threat to West Papuan sovereignty
ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

Last week, on 26 February 2025, President Prabowo Subianto officially launched Indonesia’s first bullion banks, marking a significant shift in the country’s approach to gold and precious metal management.

This initiative aims to strengthen Indonesia’s control over its gold reserves, improve financial stability, and reduce reliance on foreign institutions for gold transactions.

Bullion banks specialise in buying, selling, storing, and trading gold and other precious metals. They allow both the government and private sector to manage gold-related financial transactions, including hedging, lending, and investment in the global gold market.
Although bullion banks focus on gold, this move signals a broader trend of Indonesia tightening control over its natural resources. This could have a significant impact on West Papua’s coal industry.

With the government already enforcing benchmark coal prices (HBA) starting this month, the success of bullion banks could pave the way for a similar centralised system for coal and other minerals.

Indonesia also may apply similar regulations to other strategic resources, including coal, nickel, and copper. This could mean tighter government control over mining in West Papua.

If Indonesia expands national control over mining, it could lead to increased exploitation in resource-rich regions like West Papua, raising concerns about land rights, deforestation, and indigenous displacement.

Indonesia joined BRICS earlier this year and is now focusing on strengthening economic ties with other BRICS countries.

In the mining sector, Indonesia is using its membership to increase exports, particularly to key markets such as China and India. These countries are large consumers of coal and mineral resources, providing an opportunity for Indonesia to expand its export market and attract foreign direct investment in resource extraction.

India eyes coal in West Papua
India has shown interest in tapping into the coal reserves of the West Papua region, aiming to diversify its energy sources and secure coal supplies for its growing energy needs.

This initiative involves potential collaboration between the Indian government and Indonesian authorities to explore and develop previously unexploited coal deposits in West Papuan Indigenous lands.

However, the details of such projects are still under negotiation, with discussions focusing on the terms of investment and operational control.

Notably, India has sought special privileges, including no-bid contracts, in exchange for financing geological surveys — a proposition that raises concerns about compliance with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

The prospect of coal mining in West Papua has drawn mixed reactions. While the Indonesian government is keen to attract foreign investment to boost economic development in its easternmost provinces, local communities and environmental groups express apprehension.

The primary concerns revolve around potential environmental degradation, disruption of local ecosystems, and the displacement of indigenous populations.

Moreover, there is scepticism about whether the economic benefits from such projects would trickle down to local communities or primarily serve external interests.

Navigating ethical, legal issues
As India seeks to secure energy resources to meet its domestic demands, it must navigate the ethical and legal implications of its investments abroad. Simultaneously, Indonesia faces the challenge of balancing economic development with environmental preservation and the rights of its indigenous populations.

While foreign investment in Indonesia’s mining sector is welcome, there are strict regulations in place to protect national interests.

In particular, foreign mining companies must sell at least 51 percent of their shares to Indonesian stakeholders within 10 years of starting production. This policy is designed to ensure that Indonesia retains greater control over its natural resources, while still allowing international investors to participate in the growth of the industry.

India is reportedly interested in mining coal in West Papua to diversify its fuel sources.

Indonesia’s energy ministry is hoping for economic benefits and a potential boost to the local steel industry. But environmentalists and social activists are sounding the alarm about the potential negative impacts of new mining operations.

During project discussions, India has shown an interest in securing special privileges, such as no-bid contracts, which could conflict with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

Implications for West Papua
Indonesia, a country with a population of nearly 300 million, aims to industrialise. By joining BRICS (primarily Brasil, Russia, India, and China), it hopes to unlock new growth opportunities.

However, this path to industrialisation comes at a significant cost. It will continue to profoundly affect people’s lives and lead to environmental degradation, destroying wildlife and natural habitats.

These challenges echo the changes that began with the Industrial Revolution in England, where coal-powered advances drastically reshaped human life and the natural world.

West Papua has experienced a significant decline in its indigenous population due to Indonesia’s transmigration policy. This policy involves relocating large numbers of Muslim Indonesians to areas where Christian Papuans are the majority.

These newcomers settle on vast tracts of indigenous Papuan land. Military operations also continue.

One of the major problems resulting from these developments is the spread of torture, abuse, disease, and death, which, if not addressed soon, will reduce the Papuans to numbers too small to fight and reclaim their land.

Mining of any kind in West Papua is closely linked to, and in fact, is the main cause of, the dire situation in West Papua.

Large-scale exploitation
Since the late 1900s, the area’s rich coal and mineral resources have attracted both foreign and local investors. Large international companies, particularly from Western countries, have partnered with the Indonesian government in large-scale mining operations.

While the exploitation of West Papua’s resources has boosted Indonesia’s economy, it has also caused significant environmental damage and disruption to indigenous Papuan communities.

Mining has damaged local ecosystems, polluted water sources and reduced biodiversity. Indigenous Papuans have been displaced from their ancestral lands, leading to economic hardship and cultural erosion.

Although the government has tried to promote sustainable mining practices, the benefits have largely bypassed local communities. Most of the revenue from mining goes to Jakarta and large corporations, with minimal reinvestment in local infrastructure, health and education.

For more than 63 years, West Papua has faced exploitation and abuse similar to that which occurred when British law considered Australia to be terra nullius — “land that belongs to no one.” This legal fiction allowed the British to disregard the existence of indigenous people as the rightful owners and custodians of the land.

Similarly, West Papua has been treated as if it were empty, with indigenous communities portrayed in degrading ways to justify taking their land and clearing it for settlers.

Indonesia’s collective view of West Papua as a wild, uninhabited frontier has allowed settlers and colonial authorities to freely exploit the region’s rich resources.

Plundering with impunity
This is why almost anyone hungry for West Papua’s riches goes there and plunders with impunity. They cut down millions of trees, mine minerals, hunt rare animals and collect precious resources such as gold.

These activities are carried out under the control of the military or by bribing and intimidating local landowners.

The Indonesian government’s decision to grant mining licences to universities and religious groups will add more headaches for Papuans. It simply means that more entities have been given licences to exploit its resources — driving West Papuans toward extinction and destroying their ancestral homeland.

An example is the PT Megapura Prima Industri, an Indonesian coal mining company operating in Sorong on the western tip of West Papua. According to the local news media Jubi, the company has already violated rules and regulations designed to protect local Papuans and the environment.

Allowing India to enter West Papua, will have unprecedented and disastrous consequences for West Papua, including environmental degradation, displacement of indigenous communities, and human rights abuses.

As the BRICS nations continue to expand their economic footprint, Indonesia’s evolving mining landscape is likely to become a focal point of international investment discourse in the coming years.

Natural resources ultimate target
This means that West Papua’s vast natural resources will be the ultimate target and will continue to be a geopolitical pawn between superpowers, while indigenous Papuans remain marginalised and excluded from decision-making processes in their own land.

Regardless of policy changes on resource extraction, human rights, education, health, or any other facet, “Indonesia cannot and will not save West Papua” because “Indonesia’s presence in the sovereign territory of West Papua is the primary cause of the genocide of Papuans and the destruction of their homeland”.

As long as West Papua remains Indonesia’s frontier settler colony, backed by an intensive military presence, the entire Indonesian enterprise in West Papua effectively condemns both the Papuan people and their fragile ecosystem to a catastrophic fate, one that can only be avoided through a process of decolonisation and self-determination.

Restoring West Papua’s sovereignty, arbitrarily taken by Indonesia, is the best solution so that indigenous Papuans can engage with their world on their own terms, using the rich resources they have, and determining their own future and development pathway.

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 2, 2025

Indonesia’s bullion banks, new mining policies pose threat to West Papuan sovereignty
ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

Last week, on 26 February 2025, President Prabowo Subianto officially launched Indonesia’s first bullion banks, marking a significant shift in the country’s approach to gold and precious metal management.

This initiative aims to strengthen Indonesia’s control over its gold reserves, improve financial stability, and reduce reliance on foreign institutions for gold transactions.

Bullion banks specialise in buying, selling, storing, and trading gold and other precious metals. They allow both the government and private sector to manage gold-related financial transactions, including hedging, lending, and investment in the global gold market.
Although bullion banks focus on gold, this move signals a broader trend of Indonesia tightening control over its natural resources. This could have a significant impact on West Papua’s coal industry.

With the government already enforcing benchmark coal prices (HBA) starting this month, the success of bullion banks could pave the way for a similar centralised system for coal and other minerals.

Indonesia also may apply similar regulations to other strategic resources, including coal, nickel, and copper. This could mean tighter government control over mining in West Papua.

If Indonesia expands national control over mining, it could lead to increased exploitation in resource-rich regions like West Papua, raising concerns about land rights, deforestation, and indigenous displacement.

Indonesia joined BRICS earlier this year and is now focusing on strengthening economic ties with other BRICS countries.

In the mining sector, Indonesia is using its membership to increase exports, particularly to key markets such as China and India. These countries are large consumers of coal and mineral resources, providing an opportunity for Indonesia to expand its export market and attract foreign direct investment in resource extraction.

India eyes coal in West Papua
India has shown interest in tapping into the coal reserves of the West Papua region, aiming to diversify its energy sources and secure coal supplies for its growing energy needs.

This initiative involves potential collaboration between the Indian government and Indonesian authorities to explore and develop previously unexploited coal deposits in West Papuan Indigenous lands.

However, the details of such projects are still under negotiation, with discussions focusing on the terms of investment and operational control.

Notably, India has sought special privileges, including no-bid contracts, in exchange for financing geological surveys — a proposition that raises concerns about compliance with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

The prospect of coal mining in West Papua has drawn mixed reactions. While the Indonesian government is keen to attract foreign investment to boost economic development in its easternmost provinces, local communities and environmental groups express apprehension.

The primary concerns revolve around potential environmental degradation, disruption of local ecosystems, and the displacement of indigenous populations.

Moreover, there is scepticism about whether the economic benefits from such projects would trickle down to local communities or primarily serve external interests.

Navigating ethical, legal issues
As India seeks to secure energy resources to meet its domestic demands, it must navigate the ethical and legal implications of its investments abroad. Simultaneously, Indonesia faces the challenge of balancing economic development with environmental preservation and the rights of its indigenous populations.

While foreign investment in Indonesia’s mining sector is welcome, there are strict regulations in place to protect national interests.

In particular, foreign mining companies must sell at least 51 percent of their shares to Indonesian stakeholders within 10 years of starting production. This policy is designed to ensure that Indonesia retains greater control over its natural resources, while still allowing international investors to participate in the growth of the industry.

India is reportedly interested in mining coal in West Papua to diversify its fuel sources.

Indonesia’s energy ministry is hoping for economic benefits and a potential boost to the local steel industry. But environmentalists and social activists are sounding the alarm about the potential negative impacts of new mining operations.

During project discussions, India has shown an interest in securing special privileges, such as no-bid contracts, which could conflict with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

Implications for West Papua
Indonesia, a country with a population of nearly 300 million, aims to industrialise. By joining BRICS (primarily Brasil, Russia, India, and China), it hopes to unlock new growth opportunities.

However, this path to industrialisation comes at a significant cost. It will continue to profoundly affect people’s lives and lead to environmental degradation, destroying wildlife and natural habitats.

These challenges echo the changes that began with the Industrial Revolution in England, where coal-powered advances drastically reshaped human life and the natural world.

West Papua has experienced a significant decline in its indigenous population due to Indonesia’s transmigration policy. This policy involves relocating large numbers of Muslim Indonesians to areas where Christian Papuans are the majority.

These newcomers settle on vast tracts of indigenous Papuan land. Military operations also continue.

One of the major problems resulting from these developments is the spread of torture, abuse, disease, and death, which, if not addressed soon, will reduce the Papuans to numbers too small to fight and reclaim their land.

Mining of any kind in West Papua is closely linked to, and in fact, is the main cause of, the dire situation in West Papua.

Large-scale exploitation
Since the late 1900s, the area’s rich coal and mineral resources have attracted both foreign and local investors. Large international companies, particularly from Western countries, have partnered with the Indonesian government in large-scale mining operations.

While the exploitation of West Papua’s resources has boosted Indonesia’s economy, it has also caused significant environmental damage and disruption to indigenous Papuan communities.

Mining has damaged local ecosystems, polluted water sources and reduced biodiversity. Indigenous Papuans have been displaced from their ancestral lands, leading to economic hardship and cultural erosion.

Although the government has tried to promote sustainable mining practices, the benefits have largely bypassed local communities. Most of the revenue from mining goes to Jakarta and large corporations, with minimal reinvestment in local infrastructure, health and education.

For more than 63 years, West Papua has faced exploitation and abuse similar to that which occurred when British law considered Australia to be terra nullius — “land that belongs to no one.” This legal fiction allowed the British to disregard the existence of indigenous people as the rightful owners and custodians of the land.

Similarly, West Papua has been treated as if it were empty, with indigenous communities portrayed in degrading ways to justify taking their land and clearing it for settlers.

Indonesia’s collective view of West Papua as a wild, uninhabited frontier has allowed settlers and colonial authorities to freely exploit the region’s rich resources.

Plundering with impunity
This is why almost anyone hungry for West Papua’s riches goes there and plunders with impunity. They cut down millions of trees, mine minerals, hunt rare animals and collect precious resources such as gold.

These activities are carried out under the control of the military or by bribing and intimidating local landowners.

The Indonesian government’s decision to grant mining licences to universities and religious groups will add more headaches for Papuans. It simply means that more entities have been given licences to exploit its resources — driving West Papuans toward extinction and destroying their ancestral homeland.

An example is the PT Megapura Prima Industri, an Indonesian coal mining company operating in Sorong on the western tip of West Papua. According to the local news media Jubi, the company has already violated rules and regulations designed to protect local Papuans and the environment.

Allowing India to enter West Papua, will have unprecedented and disastrous consequences for West Papua, including environmental degradation, displacement of indigenous communities, and human rights abuses.

As the BRICS nations continue to expand their economic footprint, Indonesia’s evolving mining landscape is likely to become a focal point of international investment discourse in the coming years.

Natural resources ultimate target
This means that West Papua’s vast natural resources will be the ultimate target and will continue to be a geopolitical pawn between superpowers, while indigenous Papuans remain marginalised and excluded from decision-making processes in their own land.

Regardless of policy changes on resource extraction, human rights, education, health, or any other facet, “Indonesia cannot and will not save West Papua” because “Indonesia’s presence in the sovereign territory of West Papua is the primary cause of the genocide of Papuans and the destruction of their homeland”.

As long as West Papua remains Indonesia’s frontier settler colony, backed by an intensive military presence, the entire Indonesian enterprise in West Papua effectively condemns both the Papuan people and their fragile ecosystem to a catastrophic fate, one that can only be avoided through a process of decolonisation and self-determination.

Restoring West Papua’s sovereignty, arbitrarily taken by Indonesia, is the best solution so that indigenous Papuans can engage with their world on their own terms, using the rich resources they have, and determining their own future and development pathway.

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
February 27, 2025

Fossil Fuel Industry Wants To Keep New Buildings Dependent On Gas

A new report from InfluenceMap reveals the fossil fuel industry has been waging an international lobbying war to prevent cities and towns from requiring newly built homes and businesses to install climate-friendly heating and other appliances.

So far, 26 U.S. states have passed laws designed to prevent towns, cities, and other local governments from crafting new “natural gas bans” or enforcing those laws, according to the report. The analysis shows how utilities and their trade associations have pushed to take away local government’s power to phase out fossil fuel appliances or to limit new buildings’ connections to natural gas pipelines.

The post Fossil Fuel Industry Wants To Keep New Buildings Dependent On Gas appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
February 27, 2025

Exporting natural gas raises your power bills. Trump is doing it anyway.

When former President Joe Biden paused the Department of Energy’s approval of new natural gas export projects last January — a move received positively by environmental advocates and scorned by fossil fuel companies — the LNG industry was in the midst of a period of unbridled expansion. Sprawling export terminals had been popping up, one after another, all along the Gulf Coast in south Texas and Louisiana, with many more in various stages of planning. The consequences of the build-out on the climate and on consumers was uncertain, Biden said, echoing the concerns of advocates, and the DOE had a responsibility to understand them fully before greenlighting new developments.

“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment,” the former president said in a statement. Though Biden’s pause on new LNG developments was celebrated by climate and environmental advocates, it only applied to DOE, not the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the other agency responsible for approving gas developments.

Midway through the pause, while the DOE was assessing the advisability of new LNG developments, FERC approved the construction of a new plant by gas giant Venture Global.

Six months later, in December 2024, when government offices were beginning to empty for the winter holidays, the DOE quietly published the results of its research. Across 58 pages, the report succinctly confirmed what many climate and environmental justice advocates had feared: Exporting huge quantities of natural gas abroad increases domestic fuel and electricity prices. Not only that, but export terminals are massive greenhouse gas emitters, undermining the fossil fuel industry’s contention that LNG is a clean alternative to coal, and dumping hulking export terminals on pristine wetlands has a devastating effect on the multigenerational fishing communities of the Gulf Coast.

“Today’s publication reinforces that a business-as-usual approach is neither sustainable nor advisable,” the agency wrote in a press release announcing the report.

The following month, President Donald Trump began his second term, and rather than sending the mixed messages under the Biden administration, the federal government’s position on LNG exports became uniformly supportive. On his first full day in office, Trump ended Biden’s moratorium on new export projects. Then, in mid-February, FERC issued Venture Global another major greenlight.

In its supplemental environmental impact assessment, FERC determined that Venture Global’s CP2 LNG project presented “no significant emissions” to the surrounding area — a blatant contradiction of the DOE’s prior report. A week later, under the new leadership of former hydraulic fracking magnate Chris Wright, the DOE authorized Commonwealth LNG’s proposed export terminal. In its decision, the agency did not reference its own December report. The omission calls into question the candidness of Trump’s “America First” agenda, said Tyson Slocum, the director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

“Every single Trump action, especially on energy, is designed to raise prices for Americans and maximize profits for the fossil fuel industry,” he said. “When you put the industry in charge of policy, the policy will reflect industry priorities.”

Both of the LNG export terminals that received approvals this month are slated for southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish, a wetland region that just a few decades ago was home to one of the largest seafood producers in the country. Though successive hurricane seasons and industrial development have crippled the industry, artisan fishermen and shrimpers continue to work in the parish, several of whom joined a lawsuit against FERC for approving Venture Global’s CP2 plant. After the lawsuit was filed, the commission set aside its authorization to make it more “legally durable,” explained Megan Gibson, a lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center who works on LNG. The supplemental EIS issued earlier this month is supposed to provide that durability, and set the project back in motion.

“This EIS reads like [FERC] checking a box so that we can get this project built without assessing the impacts on the local community and quite frankly our national economy,” Gibson told Grist.

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Venture Global’s CP2 facility would be one of the largest liquefied gas export terminals in the world. The plans consist of an 18-block liquefaction plant, a pre-treatment plant, massive aboveground storage tanks, and an 84-mile pipeline connecting the facility to natural gas feedstocks in Jasper and Newton County, Texas. The company already operates an LNG terminal in Louisiana’s Cameron Parish and is in the process of building a separate one in Plaquemines Parish in the state’s southeast. In 2023, Grist visited the property of John Allaire, whose land abuts the facility, and witnessed the hundred-foot flares emitted by the Venture Global’s smoke stacks — evidence of operational problems that advocates say the company has yet to solve. Before Venture Global can break ground on CP2, FERC will have to issue a final draft of the supplemental EIS, and DOE will have to issue an approval of its own.

Like other experts that Grist spoke to, Gibson said FERC’s actions didn’t surprise her since the commission has a reputation for rubber-stamping new gas projects under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It’s really the DOE, she continued, that has historically been more of a check on the industry. Under the National Gas Act, both FERC and DOE are required to determine whether a new LNG development is in the public interest before approving it. That burden of proof has been the easiest way for advocates to fight agency decisions in court.

“Transforming this once idyllic coastal community into this industrial hub … That doesn’t seem like it’s in the public interest,” said Gibson. Venture Global did not respond to a request for comment.

The DOE’s December 2024 report identifying risks to the public from unchecked LNG exports is currently open for public comment. The Trump administration extended the comment period until late March. Slocum, the director of the energy program at Public Citizen, believes that this decision may be a tactical one more than it is a genuine openness for public input — giving fossil fuel companies more time to commission studies that would undermine the DOE’s previous findings. In an email, Grist asked the DOE why they extended the comment period, but did not hear back.

“Industry is going to basically try to buy a pro-public interest analysis through some very expensive fancy studies that the DOE is going to rely heavily on,” Slocum said. It was his and other advocates’ job to poke holes in those studies. “We don’t have the money, but I think we have the facts on our side.”

Beyond the impacts to consumers, locals, and the climate, experts pointed out that building new LNG terminals in an already saturated market doesn’t make sense economically. A recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that Europe, the U.S.’s largest gas export market, experienced a 19 percent decline in LNG imports last year, with gas demand at an 11-year low. Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, IEEFA’s lead energy analyst for Europe, said the trend reflects new renewable projects coming online as well as countries using gas from their own reserves. While she expects demand to increase next year, in particular due to a cold early winter season and the need to replenish reserves, Jaller-Makarewicz said she does not expect it to rise again to levels seen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration appears undeterred by these figures. Earlier this month, Trump announced a joint venture with Japan for a proposed $44 billion LNG project in Alaska, a move that could make the East Asian country — which has the second-highest LNG demand in the world — more reliant on U.S. gas.

“There has to be a need for the project, and what we see with this project is that it’s essentially taking domestic U.S.-grade gas and shipping it overseas,” said Caroline Reiser, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council working on the case against FERC for approving CP2.

According to Reiser, whether or not Trump finds a market for the gas plants coming online, the American public could still be left holding the bag.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Exporting natural gas raises your power bills. Trump is doing it anyway. on Feb 27, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
February 25, 2025

Energy East Pipeline Revival: Why Canada Shouldn’t Waste Billions

Like zombies rising from the grave, many long-rejected oil pipeline projects like Energy East are suddenly being promoted as national necessities in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s musings about annexing Canada.

To be clear, most Canadians agree that Canada needs to take Trump’s threats seriously and accelerate long-overdue efforts to make our country less economically dependent on our newly menacing neighbour. Previous political impediments to building interprovincial infrastructure are melting away as Canadians realize protecting our national sovereignty is more important than the priorities of any given region or industry.

But before the country considers writing another blank cheque for an oil industry mega-project that may take a decade to complete, let’s make sure to “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

The post Energy East Pipeline Revival: Why Canada Shouldn’t Waste Billions appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
February 25, 2025

Can solar power avoid Trump’s culture wars?

Seamus Fitzgerald hears a lot of opinions about solar power. As the associate director of real estate at OneEnergy Renewables, a solar energy developer, he approaches farmers and other landowners across the Midwest with proposals to lease their properties for solar projects. Some landowners are excited about being part of the shift to clean energy. Others are hostile to the idea of putting rows of gleaming panels on their land.

Fitzgerald manages to convince many farmers by explaining the simple economics of leasing their land for solar power. “At the end of the day, the financial payments from these types of projects are generally higher than what folks can pull off of their ground through other types of crops,” he said. To sell solar power to people who might have hesitations, he often talks about how the technology was invented in America. “When you install a solar project, you’re collecting an American resource here in America,” Fitzgerald said.

It echoes the way that President Donald Trump talks about energy, though he’s usually heaping praise on American oil and gas, not renewables. Still, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the industry’s primary lobbying group, has found plenty of ways to align its work with the administration’s talking points. Now splayed across its site, next to an image of an American flag hovering over solar panels, is a new slogan: “American Energy DOMINANCE.” Earlier this month, the association participated in a lobbying blitz in Washington, D.C., urging lawmakers to keep tax credits for clean energy projects in place.

Solar provided almost 6 percent of total U.S. electricity generation last year, but it’s been growing fast, expected to supply “almost all growth” in electricity generation this year, according to the pre-Trump Energy Information Administration. Many are hoping that the technology — which is broadly popular among Americans, with 78 percent supporting developing more solar farms — can manage to stay out of Trump’s culture wars over climate change. More so than wind power with its towering turbines, solar energy has an ability to bridge ideological divides, appealing to environmentalists and “don’t-tread-on-me” libertarians alike.

“President Trump has specifically said that he loves solar — and as energy demand soars, we know that solar is the most efficient and affordable way to add a lot of energy to the grid, fast,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s president and CEO, in a statement to Grist.

In December, her trade group released a policy roadmap that reflects Trump’s agenda, with priorities such as “eliminate dependence on China” and “cut red tape in the energy sector.” It’s a change from the vision the association laid out in 2020 after the election of former President Joe Biden, when Hopper promised to “meet the moment of the climate era with equity and justice at the forefront.”

The new language reflects a change in the federal government’s priorities, but also a recognition among solar advocates that they don’t need to talk about climate change to advance clean technologies. “Energy independence — I think that they should scream that from the rooftops,” Fitzgerald said. “Every single politician in the world, in America, should be saying, ‘We’re trying to make these things here to collect energy here.’”

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Last year, solar represented more than 80 percent of new electrical generating capacity added to the U.S. grid. But some predict a slowdown. Solar industry stocks plummeted after Trump’s election in November as investors speculated that Republicans might repeal tax credits for solar in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law Biden signed in 2022. In January, a report from the data analytics company Wood Mackenzie projected that solar installations would stagnate in many countries because of “post-election uncertainty, waning incentives, power sector reforms, and a shift towards less ambitious climate agendas.”

“The bottom line is all that adds up to market uncertainty for one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, and nothing is more important to businesses and investors than market clarity,” said Bob Keefe, the executive director of E2, a nonpartisan organization promoting policies that are good for the economy and environment. “And right now, what Washington is doing in regard to the future of clean energy in America is about as clear as a snowstorm in D.C. at midnight.”

Trump has complained about wind power ever since an offshore wind farm threatened the pristine view from his golf course in Scotland soon after he bought it in 2006. On his first day in office this year, he halted new permits for wind projects on federal lands and waters. But his administration’s position on solar is unclear: He has ranted about how solar farms take over deserts while at the same time saying he’s a “big fan” of the technology. “I think they’re more favorable to solar,” Keefe said, “but who knows? And for who knows how long?”

The Trump administration’s assault on federal bureaucracy has already jeopardized solar projects. The administration has withheld federal grants for climate programs, including Solar for All, a $7 billion program to bring residential solar to low-income neighborhoods, despite court orders to release funding. “We’re seeing real delays in getting that money out the door to the projects that need it,” said Sachu Constantine, executive director of Vote Solar, a nonprofit working to make solar power accessible.

Despite the continued uncertainty, most Solar for All projects “are still attempting to move forward,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of alumni from the Environmental Protection Agency.

An offshore wind project is seen from Trump International Golf Links in Scotland.
Andy Buchanan / AFP via Getty Images

By some measures, the culture wars are starting to encroach on Americans’ opinions about solar. Republican support for new solar farms slumped from 84 to 64 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to polling last year from the Pew Research Center. Misinformation campaigns have increasingly targeted clean energy, pushing the idea that solar and wind are unreliable — a line taken up by Citizens for Responsible Solar, a group led by a conservative operative who works to stop solar projects on farmland and timberland.

There are some valid reasons why people have hesitations about the technology, according to Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San José State University who researches conflicts over solar developments. People might be concerned about projects that take over prime farmland, cut through animal habitat, or affect Indigenous cultural sites. Careful planning can help avoid these conflicts, Mulvaney said. Solar farms can coexist with sheep, for instance. They can be built in a way that leaves space between panels for migrating pronghorn antelope, and in general, avoids prized areas in favor of developing projects on “low-impact sites,” such as degraded lands.

Mulvaney pushes back against the narrative that these concerns are slowing down solar power, arguing that most projects don’t face any resistance at all. Utilities in the U.S. are on track to meet their goals to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2060, he pointed out. “To me, the fastest way to get more solar is to require the utilities to buy more of it sooner.”

No matter what Trump does, clean energy advocates are hopeful that solar projects can continue to move forward at the state level. “We feel good about the future for clean energy in our states in the Southeast,” said Mark Fleming, president and CEO of Conservatives for Clean Energy, an organization that works in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana. “You know, we don’t talk about it in terms of the environment — we talk about it in terms of choice and competition in the market and in terms of good economics, because the price of solar is rapidly declining.” Over the last decade, the cost of installing solar has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Constantine says that talking about solar’s benefits — whether that’s through creating jobs, reducing blackouts, or pushing electricity prices down — is the key to overcoming hostility. “It is a way to reduce costs, and in this era of rising energy costs and real pinching in people’s pocketbooks, I think that’s a message that resonates,” Constantine said. “When you talk about affordability, resilience, reliability, people get that.”

Naveena Sadasivam contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can solar power avoid Trump’s culture wars? on Feb 25, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
February 24, 2025

The fossil fuel industry is trying to keep buildings hooked on gas. Here’s how.

Fossil fuel industries in the United States, European Union, and Australia are leading parallel campaigns to block policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. That’s according to a new report by the London-based think tank InfluenceMap, which found that in all three regions, laws that restrict natural gas use in buildings have faced significant pushback from oil and gas companies and utilities.

Those efforts have largely succeeded in preventing and weakening new laws, resulting in delayed climate action on a global scale. Drawing from an InfluenceMap database that tracks corporate engagement on climate policies, researchers found that fossil fuel companies and their trade associations have used similar lobbying tactics across countries, including setting up ad campaigns and front groups, appealing directly to legislators, and taking legal action. They’ve also developed tailored narratives for each region to mislead consumers and promote gas use, according to the report.

Taken together, the campaigns have resulted “in policy wins for the fossil fuel industry,” said report co-author Emilia Piziak. “All these narratives that they’re using to prolong the role of fossil gas are counter to leading climate science and public health studies.” (“Fossil gas” is another term for natural gas, which is composed primarily of the greenhouse gas methane.)

Between construction, electricity, and heating, buildings account for 21 percent of carbon emissions globally, and about a quarter of those emissions come from burning fossil fuels on site. Replacing fossil fuel-powered heating systems and appliances with heat pumps and other electric alternatives — a strategy known as electrification — is one of the most effective ways to cut emissions and improve air quality. The report focused on the EU, Australia, and U.S. because all three are home to recently introduced electrification policies that have also faced intense industry opposition.

The controller of a home heating system.
Frank Rumpenhorst / picture alliance via Getty Images

In the U.S., local gas bans and electrification ordinances sprung up in dozens of cities after Berkeley, California, introduced a first-in-the-nation ban on burning gas in new buildings in 2019. Fossil fuel companies and utilities have filed lawsuits and amicus briefs, published statements, and run ad campaigns to oppose these bans. Utilities have also funded community groups that appear to be grassroots, a strategy known as astroturfing, to undermine electrification policies in places like Colorado and Eugene, Oregon.

According to the report, trade groups like the American Gas Association, the National Propane Gas Association, and Consumer Energy Alliance have also pushed for new state-level laws to prevent local governments from introducing gas bans. Such preemption laws have now passed in 26 states. Local policies have also ground to a halt: Last year, the city of Berkeley agreed to stop enforcing its gas ban following its defeat in a prolonged court battle launched by the California restaurant industry — a loss that prompted several communities to pull back similar bans.

The majority of U.S. lobbying efforts have centered around the narrative that “consumer choice must be protected,” the report found. Itai Vardi, a researcher at the utility watchdog Energy and Policy Institute who was not involved with the report, said this messaging is prevalent throughout the U.S. and “nothing less than misleading propaganda.”

“Industry is trying to harness dominant American cultural values such as ‘freedom,’ ‘choice,’ and ‘individualism’ to serve its own narrow economic interests of keeping gas in the mix,” Vardi told Grist. “Yet the main proponents of this line, gas utilities and their trade associations and front groups, are in fact monopoly entities that by definition have great control over their customers’ energy options.”

A natural gas pipeline. CFOTO / Future Publishing via Getty Images

Bryson Hull, a spokesperson for Consumer Energy Alliance, told Grist that the group is “proud of its advocacy work in multiple states to ensure natural gas remains an affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy option for Americans.” The American Gas Association and the National Propane Gas Association did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

Industry groups in the EU and Australia are using strikingly similar tactics and arguments. In the EU, oil and gas companies successfully lobbied to add incentives for hybrid heating systems that use fossil fuels to a recent law intended to boost energy efficiency in buildings. The report found that industry arguments have most often centered around the idea that policy should be “technology neutral,” despite findings by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the United Nations’ top scientific body on climate change, that renewables and “technology-specific” policies have lowered emissions worldwide.

In the state of Victoria in Australia, companies ran ads to oppose a recent gas ban in new buildings, arguing that electrification would worsen affordability and energy security. This message contradicts the UN panel’s finding that deploying clean power makes energy cheaper and more reliable, researchers wrote. In September, the state of Victoria announced that stoves would be exempt from plans to phase out gas in existing homes.

Environmental groups protest a local utility’s membership in the American Gas Association in Denver, Colorado, in 2023. Hyoung Chang / The Denver Post via Getty Images

The research provides further proof that “fossil fuel and utility industries employ highly coordinated and planned attacks against one of the most important climate and public health measures: getting buildings off of fossil fuels,” said Vardi. He added that in the U.S., utilities often charge customers for such lobbying costs, including for membership dues to trade associations.

A small number of energy companies, however, have taken science-aligned positions and supported electrification. In the U.S., for example, the trade group Advanced Energy United and the HVAC company Trane Technologies have supported federal climate and building efficiency policies. Companies should reevaluate not only their individual stances but also their membership to trade associations that are blocking building electrification, report co-author Vivek Parekh said. The utility Eversource, for instance, left the American Gas Association in 2023 to “redirect costs to more targeted associations and memberships with a focus on decarbonization.”

For now, though, “These voices are being overwhelmed by the fossil fuel industry,” said Parekh. “The overwhelming opportunity here is for those voices to strengthen their advocacy for building electrification and the phaseout of gas.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The fossil fuel industry is trying to keep buildings hooked on gas. Here’s how. on Feb 24, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.
February 23, 2025

Rural New England needs EV chargers for tourism. The Trump administration is making it harder to build them.

When Charyl Reardon needs to charge her electric vehicle quickly, she has to leave her home in New Hampshire’s White Mountains region and drive 65 miles south on the interstate highway until she reaches the capital city of Concord.

For those like Reardon, a resident of the Lincoln Woodstock community in northern New Hampshire, this kind of routine is not uncommon. Public charging stations for electric vehicles, or EVs, are scarce in rural parts of the state. Compared to the rest of New England, which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, the Granite State has lagged in its rollout of public EV infrastructure.

“They’re kind of sprinkled along parts around the White Mountains,” said Reardon. “You don’t often see fast chargers by any means.”

Some businesses and municipalities in the state are looking to ramp up the construction of public EV charging stations to meet growing demand. But a recent move by President Donald Trump’s administration could make doing so more difficult. On February 6, 2025, the Federal Highway Administration released a memo suspending the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, a resource supporting the construction of public EV infrastructure in states. The two phases of the program, spread over five years, award competitive grants of up to 80 percent federal funding for EV infrastructure projects along major roadways and in communities across the country. States are required to contribute the other 20 percent of costs, often through private investment.

Reardon is the president of the White Mountains Attractions Association, which operates a visitor center at the entrance to the region in North Woodstock, New Hampshire. Travel and tourism make up the second largest sector in the state’s economy, and most visitors arrive by car. But New Hampshire’s slow approach to building public EV infrastructure could cost the state more than $1.4 billion in tourism revenue by 2031, Clean Energy NH and Ski NH found in a January 2025 study.

EV charging stations at Loon Mountain Resort in New Hampshire’s White Mountains region. Julia Tilton

The region that will be hardest hit is the White Mountains, which is projected to lose $353 million by 2031, according to the study, which was supported by the Environmental Defense Fund.

With EVs projected to approach 30 percent of the cars on New England roads between now and the early 2030s, the study found that New Hampshire will fall behind neighboring Vermont and Maine—its key competitors in the regional tourism market—should it continue to lag in developing EV infrastructure. For Reardon, the need is already clear. Fast chargers are in the works at the visitor center where Reardon is based, located off Interstate 93, which connects Boston to the White Mountains.

The memo from the Federal Highway Administration has caused confusion and concern among states and contractors hired to install projects, said Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, an EV data platform tracking how states use federal funds for EV infrastructure.

“There is no legal basis and authority to do this,” said McDonald. “It is all about creating havoc.”

The NEVI program was established under the Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of legislation passed by Congress in 2022. To fundamentally change the NEVI program, Congress will need to revise the law. McDonald said he expects state attorneys general to prepare lawsuits against the memo in coordination with their departments of transportation and energy, which funnel NEVI funds to projects at the local level.

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In the meantime, states are pausing parts of their NEVI programs. While New Hampshire has already been awarded $2.8 million in NEVI funding to build charging stations along major EV corridors as part of the program’s first phase, it is unclear whether it will see any funding for phase two of the program to build EV infrastructure in communities.

A spokesman from New Hampshire’s Department of Transportation confirmed to the Daily Yonder that the state will continue with phase one NEVI sites as planned. The spokesman said phase two NEVI development is “on hold” until the state receives further guidance and direction from its federal partners.

Beyond phase one NEVI funding the Granite State has already invested into projects in the White Mountains and other regions, close to $30 million in federal funding has been greenlit for building public charging infrastructure along major roadways and in communities. That funding comes through the rest of the NEVI program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant Program, which was created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

While the February 6 memo from the Federal Highway Administration says that reimbursement of “existing obligations” will be allowed, there is uncertainty as to which projects are considered to be “obligated,” given that the memo also suspends approvals for all plans for all years of the program. This comes as all states that have submitted their annual NEVI plans have received approval and obligation for four out of the program’s five years, McDonald said.

“It’s a real head scratcher, because on one hand it’s saying, we’re going to reimburse for existing obligations, but it’s also saying we’re throwing out the first four years of the plans,” McDonald said.

‘Here in New England, people drive’

The White Mountain Attraction Association tallies 51 charging stations in the region, most of which are located at restaurants and lodging facilities. Ski areas like Loon Mountain Resort and Cranmore Mountain Resort have also invested in EV infrastructure, which tends to be more open to the public, Reardon said.

“The North Country we often refer to as a charging desert, or ‘the donut hole,’” said Jessyca Keeler, president of Ski NH, one of the organizations associated with the tourism impact study.

In a region known for its year-round recreational activities such as skiing, biking, and hiking, this poses a challenge for meeting visitors’ needs.

“This is important for our industry because here in New England, people drive,” Keeler said.

In 2022, Massachusetts and Connecticut sent more than 4 million tourists to the Granite State out of 14.3 million total overnight visitors that year. Massachusetts sends the most visitors to the state of any place of origin, and in the winter, roughly half of all skiers come from the Bay State.

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Drivers in Massachusetts and Connecticut are also adopting EVs faster than their New Hampshire counterparts. Compared to New Hampshire’s small but growing population of EV drivers, 77 percent of all EVs in New England were operated by Massachusetts and Connecticut drivers in 2023, according to the study released by Clean Energy NH and Ski NH. By 2033, Massachusetts is expected to have 1.7 million EVs on the road while Connecticut is expected to have 600,000, compared to 200,000 vehicles projected in New Hampshire, the study found.

Assuming a “baseline scenario” where the Granite State installs 30 percent of the EV chargers needed to support tourism by early next decade, the study found that nearly 4 in 10 EV drivers and would-be tourists might not travel to the state due to “inadequate” charging infrastructure. This shortfall is behind the projected loss of $1.4 billion in cumulative revenue that the study found could hit the state’s economy by 2031.

That number is equivalent to losing an entire season of tourism, said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy NH.

“Imagine if during one summer, no tourists came to New Hampshire at all,” said Evans-Brown. “That would be the biggest headline you would see.”

Evans-Brown and Keeler agree that at the state’s current pace, it will not be prepared to meet the demand for chargers from EV drivers coming from both in- and out-of-state. Both said they are prepared to advocate in favor of state-level policy changes to lower barriers for building the necessary public EV infrastructure for the tourism market.

“When we’re talking to our legislators in this state, it’s really important to show the business case,” Keeler said. “When you start talking dollars and cents and the economy and tax revenues and those kinds of things, people listen on both sides of the fence.”

In a state known for its purple politics, ideological differences over EVs have slowed the state from adopting policies that would make charging infrastructure more affordable for businesses and small communities, Evans-Brown said. Meanwhile, neighboring states like Massachusetts have expanded incentives to build public charging stations through “Make-Ready” programs that anticipate a surge in EV drivers over the next decade.

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Evans-Brown said that Massachusetts justified its program by demonstrating that public EV infrastructure would help the state reach its climate goals. New Hampshire’s 2024 Priority Climate Action Plan references financing to support the development of public EV charging stations, though the state has yet to enact a “Make-Ready” program.

If the state were to consider the number of EVs expected to be on the road in the early 2030s—given that adoption rates are projected to continue growing over the next ten years—Evans-Brown said the financial benefit would become clear. While the tourism impact study that Keeler and Evans-Brown worked on demonstrates how the Granite State’s economy could suffer from failing to install public EV infrastructure, a comprehensive look at what the state stands to gain has yet to be done.

“You can justify these programs just on a cost basis if you do that kind of analysis,” Evans-Brown said. “But we haven’t gotten there yet.”

‘You build it and they will come’

In the state’s southwest corner, four spots in the Monadnock Food Co-op’s parking lot are now reserved for EV drivers looking to charge. Located in Keene, New Hampshire, some twenty minutes from both the Massachusetts and Vermont borders, the cooperatively-owned grocery store installed the chargers with the help of state funding in the spring of 2024.

“It just seemed like a perfect pairing for an EV driver to be able to use these charging stations while doing some grocery shopping or getting lunch or dinner, for example,” said Michael Faber, the co-op’s general manager.

The approximately $233,000 project to deploy the store’s chargers was financed by New Hampshire’s $30.9 million share of the Volkswagen Mitigation Trust. That pool of funding was established after Volkswagen settled with the federal government for its violations of the Clean Air Act in the 2010s.

Since installing the charging station last year, Faber said the use has continued to grow. Travelers and locals alike have expressed appreciation for them, Faber said, as there are not many fast-charging options in the rural Monadnock region.

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“You build it, and they will come,” said James Penfold, director of eMobility Solutions at ReVision Energy, the solar and EV charger installation company that the Monadnock Food Co-op partnered with on the charging station.

Penfold, who has worked with organizations across northern New England on EV infrastructure, said that projects are often cost-prohibitive to install without government assistance. Level two chargers, which can fill a car to full charge in several hours, cost thousands of dollars. Level three fast chargers, which let drivers plug in for 20-30 minutes before driving away, start in the tens of thousands of dollars. Labor and installation with the utility adds to the total cost of deployment.

“Even level twos, they’re relatively expensive to install, so it’s really disappointing for the state right now that there are no incentives to be able to encourage them and help defray some of that cost,” Penfold said.

In the northern part of the state, Charyl Reardon expressed a similar sentiment. She said the upfront costs to install public EV chargers are unfeasible for many local businesses and municipalities in the White Mountains, even if they recoup the money later.

For New Hampshire’s rural communities, uncertainties about the future of federal funding loom over plans to build EV infrastructure. Most of the grants at the state level, like the $2.8 million in NEVI funding or the award from the Volkswagen Mitigation Trust, originate from the federal government.

The Trump administration’s attempts to freeze federal spending—which continue to be challenged in courts—has left the future of that funding unclear.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural New England needs EV chargers for tourism. The Trump administration is making it harder to build them. on Feb 23, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
February 19, 2025

US Energy Secretary Backs Coal And Attacks ‘Sinister’ Climate Targets

Donald Trump’s new energy secretary has today vowed to “get out of the way” of coal, oil and gas, and called the UK’s 2050 net zero target “a sinister goal” that would “impoverish” people.

Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive appointed by U.S. President Trump, was speaking via video link at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, a right-wing forum run by fierce opponents of climate policies.

He also downplayed the threat from extreme weather, and suggested that climate action is part of a plot to “grow government power” and “shrink human freedom”.

The post US Energy Secretary Backs Coal And Attacks ‘Sinister’ Climate Targets appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

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