A whistleblowing Pennsylvania oil and gas worker, together with the state’s former lead environmental regulator, are ringing the alarm bell on an unregulated and shadowy network of pipelines at least hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of miles long. The pipeline system was constructed over the past decade by oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania to transport toxic and radioactive fracking wastewater.
“There is no oversight,” says Robert Green, who works in southwestern Pennsylvania as a hydrostatic tester, a niche job in the industry that involves assuring pipelines can appropriately handle the complex and often hazardous fuels and waste streams they contain.
Palestinians accuse UK firm of breaching human rights laws by piping oil allegedly used by Israeli army
Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza are taking legal action against BP for running a pipeline that supplies much of Israel’s crude oil.
The claimants have sent the British oil company a letter before claim, alleging it is breaching its stated commitments to human rights under international law.
An international pressure group is calling on governments and financial institutions to reconsider funding a plan to help Vietnam transition from fossil fuels to clean energy while it jails climate activists.
The Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JETP, was unveiled two years ago by Vietnam and the International Partners Group, comprising the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Japan and Canada.
The partners committed to provide US$15.5 billion in loans, along with technical assistance to support the elimination of fossil fuels. Under the plan, Vietnam has obtained $2.75 billion so far in concessional loans from international financial institutions, according to the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, a grouping of more than 100 non-governmental organizations from over 50 countries.
But Vietnam has also cracked down on environmental activists, as it does on almost anyone who questions the authority of the ruling Communist Party, invariably for spurious reasons, government critics say.
“The Vietnamese government has been criminalizing environmental and climate leaders on false charges,” the rights coalition said in a report released last month and posted on social media platform X on Dec. 16.
“Although the resulting Just Energy Transition Partnership agreement includes references to the importance of holding consultations and ensuring broad social consensus, the authorities have targeted climate and environmental leaders who were conducting legitimate policy and advocacy work around the just transition, and the need to phase out coal and scale-up renewable energy alternatives,” the group said.
It cited environmentalists Dang Dinh Bach, Nguy Thi Khanh, Hoang Thi Minh Hong, Mai Phan Loi and Bach Hung Duong who were convicted of “tax evasion” and sentenced to terms of as much as five years in prison.
It also mentioned Ngo Thi To Nhien, who was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for “appropriating documents.” Nhien was executive director of the Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition Social Enterprise, which worked with Vietnamese authorities, foreign governments and corporations to try to reform the energy sector and accelerate its transition to carbon neutrality.
The JETP says that in order for a transition to clean energy to be just and equitable “regular consultation is required, including with media, NGOs and other stakeholders to ensure broad social consensus.”
The Coalition for Human Rights in Development argues that Hanoi’s imprisonment of activists sends a different message.
“The criminalization of these six environmental and climate leaders, along with broader civic space restrictions, indicate that it is not safe for local human rights defenders and community members to meaningfully participate, seek information, or raise concerns about just energy transition plans,” it said.
Radio Free Asia emailed Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking for comment on the statement but did not receive a response by time of publication.
The 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize laureate Diane Wilson said she agreed that international financiers needed to think again about providing funds to Vietnam.
“As a grassroots environmental activist in the United States and a fourth-generation fisherman in the Gulf of Texas, I support the coalition in urging international partners and donors to reconsider their plans to support the communist regime in its clean energy transition,” Wilson said.
Thuc Quyen, a German-Vietnamese activist, said the Vietnamese government should improve its human rights record, protect the environment, and fight corruption in order to receive international attention and assistance.
“Vietnam needs to release Dang Dinh Bach and other environmental activists, and establish minimum standards that protect civil space, protect fundamental human rights and transparency, and respect independent oversight,” she told RFA.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.
This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the U.S. has seen since the 1970s.
But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws.
Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration.
Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.
But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.”
The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields:
Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”
Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case.
“We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.”
Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped.
None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public.
In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done.
Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County.
In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.
As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by petitioners — including the 2018 feasibility study — there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the railway.”
Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio — a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project.
DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it, because in the three years since the IPO, it has done … nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment.
Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when itrequired the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.
Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies?
During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers.
“You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement.
Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.)
While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station.
There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them.
“This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Biden administration has released a long-awaited analysis on the economic and environmental effects of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, exports, concluding any further expansion would drive up costs for domestic consumers and hamper efforts to curtail the climate crisis.
In January, Joe Bidenpaused the Department of Energy’s approvals of fossil gas exports to big consumers in Asia and Europe in order to conduct the review, in a move welcomed by climate scientists, environmental justice advocates, and public health experts but decried by the oil and gas industry.
The analysis published showed rising LNG exports risk dramatically raising greenhouse gas emissions and could also trigger price hikes for U.S. energy consumers, said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, in a letter summarizing the research’s findings.
Granholm told reporters that a business-as-usual approach to LNG export permits was neither sustainable nor advisable, and that the findings underscored the need for a cautious approach to new permits.
The Department of Energy analysis was welcomed by environmental groups.
“The study makes it clear that expanding fossil fuel exports would greatly harm the economy, climate, and environment,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“At a time when the world should be increasingly committed to moving away from fossil fuels, the U.S. must adopt a forward-looking view to ensure the public is not saddled with the costs and consequences of short-sighted decisions that pander to the narrow interests of polluting corporations.”
The Energy Department will now open a 60-day comment period on the draft analysis.
Donald Trump, a climate skeptic and supporter of fossil-fuel development, has promised to immediately end the moratorium on new LNG export permits when he returns to the White House in January.
In response to the energy department analysis, Moneen Nasmith, senior attorney at Earthjustice, a legal advocacy group, said that the Department of Energy’s “analysis confirms the facts we’ve known for years: Rampant LNG exports drive up energy prices, contribute to the catastrophic effects of climate change, and delay the global transition to truly clean energy. Allowing projects like the massive CP2 [Calcasieu Pass 2] proposal in Louisiana to move forward goes against the public interest.”
“These studies show clearly that LNG exports are in gas executives’ best interest and nobody else’s,” said Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
“Exporting fracked gas worsens climate change, harms wildlife, and raises prices for U.S. consumers. The studies find current supply meets all domestic and global energy needs. Expanding LNG hasn’t been in the public interest for a long time.”
The U.S. only began exporting LNG in 2016, but the country is now the world’s largest producer and exporter of fossil gas and oil. Biden’s pause, which came amid growing pressure from environmental advocates to make good on his campaign promise to be the country’s first climate president, held up issuing permits for more than a dozen new LNG export facilities, including the record-size CP2 project, described by an expert as a “climate bomb.”
Federal officials have been forced to defend the pause in court, while 600,000 Americans — including climate scientists, public health professionals, consumer advocates, veterans, national security experts, lawmakers, and frontline community members — weighed in, urging the Biden administration to curb fossil gas exports.
Reacting to Tuesday’s study, Tonyehn Verkitus, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, said: “LNG exports not only solidify the continued need for fracked gas, but also the release of large volumes of toxic chemicals into the air, threatening any progress on the climate crisis and clean air.
“The result is a financial win for corporations and an economic drain for the people. What no one talks about is the unmeasurable mental, emotional, and psychological impacts from noise and light pollution and the associated stress of industry.”
Research published in August from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club found the expansion of LNG exports is responsible for scores of premature deaths and nearly $1 billion in annual health costs.
Tyson Slocum, director of the nonprofit Public Citizen’s Energy Program, said:“Already approved and under construction LNG export terminals will nearly double America’s already record export capacity, and pending applications would result in as much as a quadrupling of existing capacity.
“Today’s study makes clear that all pending export applications must be denied as being inconsistent with the public interest, and should result in a reassessment of existing exports to determine compatibility with the public interest.”
With just a month left in office, the Biden administration is setting a bold new target for U.S. climate action. On Thursday, the White House announced a national goal that would see the country’s greenhouse gas emissions drop 61 to 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. That would keep the United States on a “straight line” trajectory toward Biden’s ultimate goal of hitting net zero emissions by 2050, officials said. If that happens, it would mean the country is only emitting as much carbon as it’s simultaneously sequestering through techniques like restoring forests and wetlands — in other words, that it’s no longer playing any part in warming the planet.
The announcement is the latest in a series of climate-related actions Biden is taking during his final months in office. In the last week alone, his administration pushed for an international deal to limit global fossil fuel finance and published a study that cautioned against new export infrastructure for liquefied natural gas. These actions are designed to shore up environmental action ahead of president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
Just as he did during his first term, Trump is promising to boost fossil fuels when he takes office next year. He’s also pledged to claw back funding from Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to supercharge renewable energy adoption, and to once again pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement, the 2015 United Nations accord intended to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. (That withdrawal process took years when Trump first tried it, but it will likely move much faster this time.)
“The Biden-Harris administration may be about to leave office, but we’re confident in America’s ability to rally around this new climate program,” said John Podesta, the administration’s senior climate advisor, on a call with reporters. “While the United States federal government under President Trump may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief.”
Podesta maintained that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and other federal policies have created enough momentum that emissions will continue to decline without further federal encouragement. He noted that the private sector has announced $450 billion in investments in clean energy projects over the past four years, much of which was stimulated by the IRA, and more investment is likely to follow even under Trump’s tenure. A study from Princeton University found that the law will be enough to reduce U.S. emissions by as much as 48 percent by 2035 — a good portion of the way toward the new goal, but not all the way there.
Much of the work will fall on states, who regulate their own utilities and can promote the switch to renewable energy sources. Cities run their own public transportation systems and set energy-efficiency building codes. Governors and mayors have long collaborated on more ambitious goals than the federal government, even under Democratic administrations.
“Across the country,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said in the press call Wednesday, “we see decarbonization efforts to reduce our emissions in many ways achieving escape velocity, an inexorable path, a place from which we will not turn back.”
A wide coalition of governors, mayors, tribes, and companies has pledged to continue climate progress over the next four years under Trump, and more than 200 of these entities have laid out their own climate plans. They can attempt their own decarbonization efforts, as New York state plans to do through its new congesting pricing policy in Manhattan, or by litigating against Trump’s emissions-boosting policies, as California Governor Gavin Newsom has said he plans to do.
Fundamental market forces are also at work. The prices of renewables like solar panels and wind turbines, plus the batteries to store that energy, have been plummeting. That’s partly why Texas — not exactly a bastion of climate action — now generates more renewable energy than any other state. And heat pumps — which move heat into a home using electricity instead of fossil fuels — now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S.
“Pioneering offshore wind farms are delivering clean power,” Zaidi said. “Retired nuclear plants are coming back online. America is racing forward on solar and batteries. Not just the deployment, but also the means to stamp those products ‘Made in America.’”
The new plan places particular emphasis on efforts to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the earth around 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide but lingers in the atmosphere for a shorter time period. Biden has rolled out regulations designed to penalize the huge share of methane emissions that come from the oil and gas sector, a move that even ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods has asked Trump not to repeal. Last month, at the United Nations’ international climate meeting, COP29, the U.S. announced a partnership with China to track methane leakage from oil infrastructure and develop technologies to mitigate it. The administration said it expects methane emissions to fall by 35 percent over the next decade if the nation meets its broader climate target.
The United States is submitting its new target as part of its requirements under the Paris Agreement. The treaty calls on every country to outline its climate ambitions every five years in documents known as “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs. When he took office in 2021, Biden set a national pledge to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The new 61-66 percent target for 2035 puts the U.S. in the middle of the pack when it comes to this round of Paris climate plans, which are due from all countries in February. The United Kingdom announced a much more ambitious 81 percent reduction target at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last month, while the United Arab Emirates has only committed to a 47 percent reduction over the same period. Brazil, which is hosting COP30 next year, has a goal that is similar to Biden’s.
Some advocacy organizations chastised Biden for not setting an even more ambitious target, one in line with that of the United Kingdom.
“With a climate denier about to enter the White House, the Biden administration’s new national climate plan represents the bare minimum floor for climate action,” said Ashfaq Khalfan, the climate justice director at Oxfam America, the U.S. chapter of the global anti-poverty advocacy organization. “It falls far short of the U.S.’s fair share of emissions reduction as the world’s largest historical polluter.”
But others praised Biden for trying to ratchet up climate ambition despite the dark short-term outlook. Rachel Cleetus, the climate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said other nations would appreciate that the outgoing government had set a realistic target for the nation’s climate ambition.
“I think the international community will welcome the U.S. showing it understands the importance of doing its part to meet global climate goals,” she said. “There will be challenges, for sure, but what’s not reasonable is letting political winds dictate the future of the planet and the safety of people now and for generations to come.”
In the landscape of international finance for fossil fuels, some of the most important players are obscure government bodies known as “export credit agencies.” These agencies provide funding to companies seeking to build large and risky infrastructure projects, often in developing countries. In return, the developers of those projects purchase construction materials or other goods from the country of the agency. For instance, an oil pipeline company might take a loan from a German export credit agency in exchange for using German steel in the pipeline.
Export credit agencies have become some of the world’s largest public funding sources for energy infrastructure, providing far more money than multilateral institutions like the World Bank, while avoiding much public scrutiny.
Now, as the Biden administration winds to a close, officials are working with international partners to push forward an agreement that would see export credit agencies pull back almost all funding for oil and gas projects, a measure the administration had balked on supporting before Trump’s re-election.
The talks are taking place at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, a group of 38 wealthy countries, which coordinate on export credit terms in order to prevent any one country from distorting trade relations. The countries are trying this month to hash out a verbal agreement on how to regulate their export credit agencies.
If such an agreement comes together, it would force a sea change in policy for the United States’s own export credit agency, which is known as the Export Import Bank of the United States, or EXIM. This independent agency is among the last remaining channels through which the U.S. government provides financial support to fossil fuel interests overseas. If the OECD agrees to stop export credits for fossil fuels, EXIM will have to cease approving loans to oil and gas infrastructure, potentially eliminating billions of dollars future support for such projects.
Almost a decade ago, the Obama administration helped lay the groundwork for the sort of deal that Biden is trying to strike. In 2015, Obama joined a bloc of OECD countries in agreeing to cut off loans to high-emitting coal power plants. When Trump came into office in 2017, his administration didn’t seek to pull out of that agreement, and didn’t finance any new coal plants. Then the rest of the OECD came together around an agreement to stop funding almost all coal projects, a move that reduced coal finance from countries in the group by about $4 billion per year. China, which isn’t part of the group, soon followed suit, virtually ending public finance for coal around the world.
“There’s almost no export credit agency finance that happens for coal projects,” said Kate DeAngelis, deputy director of international finance policy at the climate advocacy organization Friends of the Earth. “There are a lot of projects that we were tracking, and what we saw was they just didn’t receive financing.” This was true in Vietnam in particular, DeAngelis added, where a number of coal developers scrapped planned power plants or import terminals.
But coal projects represent only a small share of total export credit financing, most of which flows to the production and transportation of oil and natural gas. Cutting off those fuels will be more difficult. Indeed, said DeAngelis, a number of the companies behind the abandoned coal projects in Vietnam have tried to repurpose their infrastructure to build liquefied natural gas import terminals.
In 2021, soon after taking office, Biden issued an executive order that aimed to limit international public funding for fossil fuels across all government agencies. Since then, the U.S.’s Export Import Bank has nonetheless moved forward with financing a number of large oil and gas projects — such as an oil refinery expansion in Indonesia.
The most notable such project was the expansion of a $500 million oil drilling in Bahrain, which isn’t a developing country or a particularly risky investment location, unlike most nations that receive export credit funding from the United States and EXIM. The Biden administration has taken no action to overrule EXIM’s approvals of fossil projects. Following the approval of the Bahrain project, two members of EXIM’s climate advisory council resigned.
When questioned in the past about OECD proposals to restrict oil and gas finance, EXIM leaders have said they are constrained by language in the bank’s charter that prohibits it from “discrimination based on industry.” But this language isn’t necessarily the barrier that bank officials make it out to be, said Stacy Swann, one of the EXIM climate council members who resigned. Swann is also the head of Resilient Earth Capital, a climate-focused investment firm.
Neither the U.S. Export Import Bank nor the Treasury Department responded to requests for comment.
A burning flare stack at an oil and gas field in Bahrain. The Export Import Bank of the United States has granted export credit assistance to oil projects in the country, cutting against Biden administration policy. Mlenny / Getty Images
Momentum for expanding the coal pledge to oil and gas has come from Europe. Last year, the European Union last year proposed a framework for curbing oil and gas export credits to the other OECD nations, and the United Kingdom and Canada have signed on as well. The U.K. was one of the earliest proponents of ending fossil fuel export credits at the OECD, and its export credit agency has already all but cut off support for oil and gas projects—in fact, the previous head of energy finance at the agency, who used to oversee fossil loans, is now the agency’s “head of renewables and transition.” It has even given out an export credit loan to decommission fossil fuel infrastructure in Brazil.
At the time, the US declined to support the framework. It wasn’t until after Donald Trump’s re-election that the White House changed tack and endorsed it.
“The big change is that Trump won the election,” said DeAngelis. “I think that if Harris had won, I don’t think we would have seen any difference. I think they would have still been plodding along. All of a sudden they realized, okay, clock ticking, we only have two more months to do something that could have a big impact on Biden’s climate legacy.”
Even so, the support of the Biden administration doesn’t mean a deal is guaranteed. A few other countries, like South Korea (which has a robust shipbuilding industry that relies heavily on oil and gas clients) have hesitated to endorse the agreement.
Last month, after a closed-door negotiation session over the fossil fuel deal, member countries took the unusual step of scheduling a virtual overtime session to finish hammering out a deal. After holding that virtual meeting on Tuesday of this week, they scheduled another overtime session for next week, which could indicate that an agreement is close to being finalized.
“The fact that the OECD would have a unified position on this, which the US would join, I think is amazing messaging,” said Swann. But, she continued, “If you think that’s going to stop other countries from supporting oil and gas in other ways, you’re kidding yourself.” She added that private banks could also step in to fill the gap.
The International Energy Agency has said that keeping global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius will require stopping almost all new coal, oil, and gas projects, but these projects are still proceeding. A deal on export credits might not cut off those projects, but it would free up money and capacity for export agencies to invest in renewables, and might make it harder for riskier oil and gas projects to pan out in future years.
“It would not be a death knell, but it would have a serious impact,” said DeAngelis.
This summer, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) to expedite the permitting of energy infrastructure cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A similar bill is being considered by the House Committee on Natural Resources. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) reportedly wants to bring the Manchin…
When prominent entrepreneur Jigar Shah took over as head of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office in 2021, he had one primary mission: to get “dollars out the door.”
Now the office, which offers financing to clean energy technologies that struggle to borrow from banks and received a huge boost of money from the Inflation Reduction Act, is rushing to do just that before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. The incoming president, flanked by Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, is expected to target unspent funds under the IRA, including LPO programs — putting at risk billions of loan dollars yet to be granted or finalized.
With Inauguration Day looming, the office has increased its activity in recent weeks. Since last Monday alone, the LPO announced four new conditional commitments for loans and loan guarantees and finalized a pending offer.
Last Monday, the agency also announced conditional commitments for a direct loan of $6.6 billion to Rivian to build an EV manufacturing plant in Stanton Springs North, Georgia, and a loan guarantee of $290 million to Sunwealth to deploy up to 1,000 solar PV systems and battery energy storage systems across 27 states.
Under the Biden administration, LPO has so far doled out just under $55 billion in funding across 32 deals for battery and EV manufacturing, nuclear reactors, “clean” hydrogen facilities, virtual power plants, and critical minerals projects. The majority of the LPO’s investments have gone to Republican districts, according to a Politico analysis.
Most of the financing deals LPO has announced — about $41 billion worth — remain conditional, meaning the loans or loan guarantees are not yet finalized and depend on the companies meeting certain benchmarks.
Legal experts say that while the LPO’s 14 closed loans, which total more than $13 billion in investments, should remain safe from Republican backlash, delaying or undoing conditional funds could be much easier. “Immediately following inauguration of the new president, there is likely to be a period of inaction on financial assistance awards that are in negotiation and on announced funding opportunities,” wrote Hogan Lovells attorney, Mary Anne Sullivan.
A Republican-majority Congress could potentially roll back not-yet-obligated funding in order to help offset the costs of a likely extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
As of November 30, the office had 212 outstanding applications with a total of $324 billion in loans requested. In November, LPO raised its estimated remaining loan authority to nearly $400 billion.
The LPO was created in 2005 to support innovative clean energy projects — or in Shah’s words, to “build a bridge to bankability” for technologies that haven’t yet reached the at-scale deployment needed to attract commercial lenders. The Inflation Reduction Act supercharged the office’s lending authority, taking it from $40 billion to more than $400 billion.
It’s unclear what will end up happening to the loan program with a Republican trifecta in office. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Republican president, proposes eliminating the LPO altogether. Billionaires Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who have been tasked by Trump to lead a new task force called the Department of Government Efficiency, may also target the office in their sweeping proposals to slash federal programs and personnel. (Musk’s EV company, Tesla, received a $465 million loan from the office in 2010.)
Other lawmakers have suggested that the LPO could be reformed to finance more energy sources favored by Republicans and Trump’s pick for Energy secretary, fracking company CEO Chris Wright, such as nuclear and geothermal. “The LPO needs to have all energy, if we go forward with it at all,” Representative Brett Guthrie, a Republican from Kentucky, told Politico’s E&E News.
DOE officials noted that local economic growth and jobs could be jeopardized should LPO investments be curtailed.
“There is steel in the ground and job openings at new or expanded facilities around the country,” a DOE spokesperson said in a statement. “It would be irresponsible for any government to turn its back on private sector partners, states, and communities that are benefiting from lower energy costs and new economic opportunities spurred by LPO’s investments.”
Renewables continue to be the cheapest new-build electricity-generating technology, while nuclear power is around twice as expensive and has “no unique cost advantages” from its long operational life, despite the claims of nuclear power advocates. This is according to the CSIRO, which on Monday released the draft of its new GenCost report, an annual forecast…
A small town in North Carolina has taken a bold step, filing the first climate “deception” lawsuit against an electric utility in the United States.
In a civil lawsuit, the Town Council of Carrboro accuses Duke Energy, one of the largest power companies in the United States, of orchestrating a decades-long campaign of denialism and cover-up over the dangers of fossil fuel emissions. The lawsuit claims Duke’s actions stalled the transition to clean energy and exacerbated the climate crisis.
Over the past decade, similar suits have been filed by states and communities against large oil companies and — in at least one instance — a gas utility. But Carrboro, North Carolina, is the first municipality to ever file such a suit against an electric utility.
“We’re a very bold group,” Carrboro Mayor Barbara Foushee told Floodlight. “And we know how urgent this climate crisis is.”
Duke Energy said in a statement, “We are in the process of reviewing the complaint. Duke Energy is committed to its customers and communities and will continue working with policymakers and regulators to deliver reliable and increasingly clean energy while keeping rates as low as possible.”
Duke Energy’s gas-fired power plant in Arden, North Carolina. Duke Energy
The suit, filed in Orange County, North Carolina, accuses Duke Energy of intentionally spreading false information about the negative effects of fossil fuels for decades, despite knowing since the late 1960s about planet-warming properties of carbon dioxide emissions. It claims the power company funded trade organizations and climate-denying scientists who created doubts about the greenhouse effect and obstructed policy and public action on climate change.
“Duke misled the public concerning the causes and consequences of climate change and thereby materially slowed the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Duke’s deception campaign served to protect its fossil fuel-based business model.” the lawsuit reads.
Between 2005 and 2023, the company reported reducing its CO2 emissions from electricity generation by 44 percent. But in 2023, at least 45 percent of the electricity Duke produced was still generated by burning coal or methane gas.
“[Duke] was one of the ringleaders behind deceiving the public and municipalities and governments about the causes and consequences of man-made climate change,” said Raleigh attorney Matthew Quinn, who is representing the town.
Carrboro is a town of about 20,000 with an annual budget of $81 million, Foushee said. Quinn, the attorney, estimates the town will incur some $60 million in costs in adapting to climate change impacts, including repairs to roads, upgrades to stormwater systems, and increased heating and cooling costs.
The Town Council of Carrboro, North Carolina, voted Tuesday to sue Duke Energy for allegedly deceiving the public over decades about the dangers of climate change. Town of Carrboro Facebook page
At a press conference Wednesday, Quinn explained that expert analysts had arrived at that number based on the amount and cost of climate adaptation that Carrboro would have undertaken had it not been for Duke’s alleged deception.
“There’s a major gulf between where we should be at and where we are right now,” Quinn said at the press conference.
“Really, what this case is about is that Carrboro has been a victim of the climate deception campaign by Duke Energy, (and) as a result of Duke’s conduct, Carrboro has suffered a lot of damages and injustice,” Quinn said in an interview.
Added Danny Nowell, Carrboro Mayor pro tem: “We have paid for it. We have paid for excess road repairs. We have faced the effects of stormwater, and we will continue to pay for other expenses as we uncover them. It’s time for Carrboro to be repaid.”
Quinn’s fees are being paid by NC Warn, a climate nonprofit, Foushee said.
“People that run local governments and others and people that run corporations, they all better get heavily serious about the climate crisis,” said Jim Warren, executive director of NC Warn. “It’s already harming so many across this state.”
Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, called such lawsuits “cute.”
“And I use that term very, you know, intentionally. These lawsuits are cute in the sense that they’re trying to shame companies … into doing better,” said Jarvis, adding that they are rarely successful. “Companies have duties to their shareholders to maximize profits. And so what these lawsuits are really saying is that companies should be punished for maximizing profit.”
“It’s interesting with this as a case directly against a utility,” said Korey Silverman-Roati, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s a shift in perspective from companies just producing fossil fuels to those burning it.”
Although this is the first climate deception lawsuit ever filed against an electric utility, it is not the first time that electric utilities have found themselves in legal trouble for the climate warming pollution their power plants spew as they burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.
In 2004, electric companies faced federal litigation brought by eight U.S. states, New York City, and several land trusts seeking to cap the companies’ CO2 emissions. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the plaintiffs.
Chase Pellegrini de Paur from Indy Week contributed to this story.
On a hot morning in July, Ray Apy stood in a vacant lot in upstate New York and pointed to the mowed grass, explaining what he wanted to build there: a pilot plant to convert waste into something useful. He tipped the contents of a small glass jar into his cupped palm, revealing tiny black pellets the size of peppercorns.
The pellets were a substance called biochar. It’s created by heating organic matter — any substance originating from plants, animals, or other organisms — at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. This turns it into a charcoal-like substance that can be sold as an additive to concrete or soil — and, crucially, locks carbon inside.
Heralded as “black gold,” biochar promises to dispose of waste, enrich soil, and fight climate change, all which has made it the darling of the growing carbon removal industry. A 2018 report from a panel of United Nations scientists estimated the world will need to remove between 100 billion and 1 trillion metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere this century to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Most carbon removal technologies are still nascent: Direct air capture — fans that suck carbon out of the air — has received a lot ofmedia attention and investment, but has only delivered 250 tons of carbon removal, per an industry tracker. By contrast, dozens of biochar start-ups have delivered several hundreds of thousands of tons.
For Apy, a tech entrepreneur who earned a master’s degree at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, biochar primarily represents a way to ethically deal with waste while making a valuable product, fertilizer. “I didn’t create this business to address climate change,” he said. “It just happens to check that box in a big way.”
Northeastern Biochar Solutions CEO Raymond Apy in Saratoga Springs, New York. Lori Van Buren / Times Union
In 2021, Apy was excited when a local economic development company invited him to pitch the project to Moreau, a town of 16,000 people located about 40 miles up I-87 from Albany tucked in a bend of the Hudson River. Apy attended 10 meetings with the Moreau Planning Board, two of which were public, and one with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC. In 2022, the planning board granted Apy’s company, Northeastern Biochar Solutions, approval to build in their 30-year-old industrial park, vacant but for a formaldehyde plant chugging across the drive. The facility would be known as Saratoga Biochar Solutions, or just Saratoga Biochar.
In recent years, Moreau and surrounding towns have lost hundreds of industrial jobs, as a cement factory and paper mill shuttered across the river in Glens Falls within two years. This small biochar plant promised to create green new jobs and produce a locally useful product. The project was even enthusiastically supported by town supervisor Todd Kusnierz, a rising star of the New York State Republican party. The biochar looked like a win-win-win — for the town, the climate, and Saratoga Biochar.
But from Apy’s perspective, what should have been a routine permitting process was beginning to unravel. He encountered bile and sign-waving from protestors claiming to be environmentalists who wanted his plant to fail. The political upheaval that ensued included a challenge in the New York Supreme Court (which Saratoga Biochar won, pending appeal); allegations that children were tricked into signing a pro-biochar petition; reported bullying at gas stations; and neighbors putting up pointedly hostile lawn signs. Last November, Kusnierz was ousted in a 3-to-1 landslide by a challenger backed by Democrats and a grassroots clean air coalition who staked this, the “most important local election” of voters’ lifetimes, on blocking biochar. One of the new town board’s first actions: placing a nine-month moratorium on any new industrial building in the town.
What went wrong?
Moreau attorney Bill Nikas talks to the Saratoga County planning board about the moratorium that he authored, which blocked any new industrial building in Moreau for nine months. Wendy Liberatore / Times Union
To put it bluntly: poop. Saratoga’s novel biochar plant would run on human biosolids, otherwise known as sewage sludge. The facility would take in 75,000 tons per year of byproducts of treated wastewater from toilets across New York state and New England that would otherwise be bound for overflowing landfills or, in the greater Moreau area, the polluting Wheelabrator incinerator in Hudson Falls. Moreau residents feared Saratoga Biochar would put odors and dangerous chemicals in their air — potentially adding to a health burden caused by decades of pollution from other industrial facilities.
In the grassy lot, Apy knelt on the faded asphalt and laid out the thick scroll of permitting documents prepared more than a year earlier, which detailed the plant’s construction down to a chart specifying which trees would be planted (pin oak and thornless cockspur hawthorn). So far, nothing has been built.
The fate of Saratoga Biochar shows that proposed climate solutions can’t get off the ground without consent from the communities that will bear the brunt of their trade-offs — especially when those communities have a history of being harmed by industry pitching win-win solutions.
Moreau is set high on bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. The water looks tempting and cool during a summer heatwave, but conceals a dark chapter in the town’s living history.
In 1942, General Electric opened a capacitor plant in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, two towns neighboring Moreau, promising to manufacture engines to beat the Nazis with good union jobs. But over its 30 years in operation, the GE plant swilled PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are considered probable human carcinogens, into the Hudson River and dumped industrial waste into pits in Moreau. In 1983, The New York Times wrote of Moreau, “If there is such a thing as a typical town plagued by toxic waste, it may be this one,” interviewing residents complaining of skin rashes, miscarriages, and cancer that they feared could be linked to the dumping. The PCBs, which resist degradation in the environment, caused genetic deformities in local fish populations, including tomcod, and created a Superfund site stretching 200 miles downriver to the southern tip of New York City. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still monitors the local GE Caputo Superfund site, treating groundwater in a GE-funded operation expected to last 200 years.
Crews dredge the Hudson River in Fort Edward, New York, in June 2011. The work is part of a project to clean up PCBs released by General Electric decades ago. Mike Groll / AP Photo
Moreau still has big industrial neighbors. Driving around the surrounding region, Apy pointed out the now-shuttered Finch Paper mill across the river in Glens Falls and the tall pipe of the Wheelabrator incinerator in Hudson Falls, one of the top 10 emitters of mercury per ton of incinerated waste in the country, and the number one emitter of lead per ton.
In Hudson Falls, average annual emergency room visits for the inflammatory lung disease COPD are higher than 86 percent of the state; in Glens Falls, they are 96 percent higher.
About 20 miles from the industrial park where Apy hoped to build, on a sun-dappled road that swoops along the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, Ann Purdue, a lawyer with expertise in transportation systems, lives with her husband Tom Masso, now retired after a career in operations and marketing. They moved here several years ago from Washington, D.C., a homecoming for Purdue, who grew up in the Adirondacks. As a member of the town planning board, which reviews permit applications, Purdue first encountered Saratoga Biochar’s proposal in December 2021. She was immediately cautious.
For Purdue, Moreau is a town with little experience hosting heavy industry within its municipal boundaries, unlike its neighbors, and thus had little experience permitting such projects.
“This particular project … on its face sounded like a great idea — a solution for a serious problem,” Purdue said. “And then you find there are a lot of unknowns. And the question is who is going to encounter or suffer the impacts of the unknowns if they’re adverse?”
Moreau residents feared Saratoga Biochar would put odors and dangerous chemicals in their air. Wendy Liberatore / Times Union
Over 90 minutes, sitting in her high-ceilinged living room, Purdue narrated Saratoga Biochar’s permitting process and the community’s protest movement with the exactitude and documents of a deposition, including a letter she’d written to the state DEC claiming that importing 15 percent of the state’s sewage sludge to the town presented a “grossly disproportionate environmental burden” upon a community still suffering from GE’s pollution.
For Purdue and Masso, who also opposes the plant, these burdens include diesel-burning trucks barreling past schools on local roads at a frequency approved 30 years ago, before residential neighborhoods grew up around the industrial park. And potentially dangerous and smelly air emissions from a technical process that Purdue and Masso said was untested, apart from an “inadequate” 2019 test batch (which produced the biochar pellets in Apy’s bottle).
Masso went upstairs to retrieve folded copies of the Post Star, a local newspaper, containing investigations into Apy’s business partner, Bryce Meeker, who previously worked for a Nebraska facility that turned corn into ethanol until it was shut down in 2021 for pollution, groundwater contamination, and a pattern of regulatory problems. Meeker and Apy, Purdue and Masso concluded, were not prepared to run an expert, ethical operation in their town. (Meeker told Grist he was a consultant for the project, and left the role two years before the plant received any violations.)
On the planning board, Purdue advocated for an outside environmental consultant, who was not ultimately hired, and argued that Saratoga Biochar was not providing adequate documentation to ensure the plant was safe. In the spring of 2022, while the planning board was debating the site plan, the neighbors were finding out about it and getting worried.
Gina LeClair, who lives on a street of modest houses so close to the industrial park that its backyard trees are sketched on Apy’s plans, first learned of Saratoga Biochar’s plans from a short local newspaper story in April 2022, two weeks before the second public meeting. “I just knew this is big,” she said, “and there’s still people that haven’t heard about it.”
A former member of the five-person town board — Moreau’s elected legislative body — LeClair said the community and even some town board members had been in the dark about the deal as the planning board prepared to approve it. “Residents were told, ‘This is a done deal,’” LeClair said. “We responded, ‘This is not done until we say it’s done.’”
LeClair set up the Not Moreau Facebook page, some of whose posts have received 9,000 views, and reached out to neighbors across party lines and throughout the surrounding communities. LeClair’s group contacted Tracy Frisch, a board member of the Clean Air Action Network of Glens Falls, who had experience fighting industrial projects in the area. They built a coalition that included New York State Assembly member Carrie Woerner, the environmental law group Earthjustice, the student law clinic at Pace University, and a large local real estate developer.
The coalition staged a series of protests, standing on roadsides with their children in bright yellow T-shirts printed with “Not Moreau,” a motto on signs still planted on many of the lawns in front of the houses on streets surrounding the industrial park. Hundreds of protestors turned out at the August 2022 meeting where the planning board voted to approve the permits, crowding the room and hallways carrying signs that read “No Biochar,” per local media. Some left chanting, “This is not over.”
A family attends a protests against Saratoga Biochar in July 2022 in Glens Falls, New York. Courtesy of Tianna Bubello
The “Not Moreau” campaign cast its sights on the November 2023 town election, urging voters to elect candidates who opposed the biochar project. Ultimately, 76 percent of Moreau voters cast ballots for the town supervisor candidate backed by the anti-biochar coalition. Voters also ousted town board members who had previously voted to approve the project. In April 2024, the new town board passed the nine-month moratorium on all industrial building while the town reassessed its zoning regulations.
“It’s been a real community thing,” LeClair said, tearing up over how everyone had come together. “I don’t think it’s the norm. I think it’s the small groups, and they fight, and they hope,” she concluded. “It’s the biggest thing I ever did in my life.”
But the protest movement’s victory — and its methods — were not universally supported in Moreau. Kyle Noonan, a current town board member, favored the plant for the jobs and tax base it would create — and said that he faced open hostility from formerly friendly neighbors for taking that position.
A sign associated with the pushback against Saratoga Biochar in Moreau, New York. Courtesy of Gina LeClair
An Earth science teacher, Noonan had read up on biochar and was persuaded the method was not only safe, but innovative. “I was excited that maybe the town of Moreau was going to be part of this first carbon sequestration process that was going to take this growing problem of more sewage, more sewage, more sewage, and do something with it,”he said. He said he found it perplexing that the protestors blocking the plant claimed to be environmentalists and ignored expert testimony in favor of what he read as misinformation.
“They lined our streets with their children holding up posters saying, ‘You’re going to give us cancer,’” said Noonan.
Following the moratorium, whether or not the plant would get built in the long run hinged on three all-important approvals from the state — an air permit, a solid-waste management permit, and a so-called beneficial-use permit — that Apy had yet to receive. In February, the DEC held two nights of hearings, both in person and virtually, to receive public comments on the project.
The night before the first hearing, Frisch organized an information session for dozens of community members. They listened as the experts shared information about today’s class of “forever chemicals,” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — which sounded eerily similar to the PCBs that had plagued their town for decades. Commonly used in water-resistant products, these molecules consist of long chains of carbon atoms bound to fluorine, a hardy chemical linkage that is hard to destroy, and which allows them to persist in our water, blood, and guts. PFAS are used in all kinds of products, including carpeting, pizza boxes, shampoo, and dental floss. They’ve been tied to multiple health issues, including higher risks of certain cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays in children. They are also found in high concentrations in sewage sludge, partially from what gets flushed down toilets including menstrual products, toilet paper, and human waste, as well as from industrial wastewater that gets mixed in at a wastewater treatment plant.
In February, the DEC held two nights of hearings, held both in person and virtually, to receive public comments on the project. Wendy Liberatore / Times Union
Some Moreau residents were worried about the Saratoga Biochar plant emitting noxious smells, and about diesel exhaust from trucks. Some people were worried about nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and even heavy metals wafting into the town’s air. But the possibility of breathing in PFAS emitted from the plant became a flash point for the town. For Frisch and many residents, PFAS came to define the scientific case against Saratoga Biochar.
At the information session, Denise Trabbic-Pointer laid out that case in front of community members. A former DuPont chemical engineer of 35 years, Trabbic-Pointer now volunteers with the Sierra Club to expose the risks of the very chemicals she helped create. Her first slide title that night read: “Caution! The SBS [Saratoga Biochar Solutions] Proposed Facility will be a Grand Experiment with the Community as the Guinea Pig.”
Trabbic-Pointer warned that while the imported sewage sludge’s chemical composition was unknown, it would undoubtedly contain PFAS. She listed health impacts linked to the chemicals, including hypertension, preeclampsia, asthma, and heart and lung disease. “I worked in Teflon [a product that contains PFAS], so I can tell you that I’m rotting from the inside out,” she said. Later, Trabbic-Pointer described walking past vats of Teflon while pregnant with her daughter, who also suffered health problems. At the end of her presentation, a community member asked if his well water might become contaminated with PFAS because of Saratoga Biochar. “It’s likely,” Trabbic-Pointer responded. “It can happen.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a community traumatized by another class of forever chemicals, residents latched onto these PFAS concerns, and it became a common point in most public comments about the plant’s permit approvals. It was striking for Apy; his plant is a solution to the PFAS crisis, he said, not the cause.
“They just refuse to believe the science — it’s like science denial,” he said. Opponents of Saratoga Biochar aren’t “taking the time to read all the information that is right there in the permit applications. It leaves really nothing to question.”
A poultry farm produces biochar made from chicken waste and wood chips in Wardensville, West Virginia. Jeff Hutchens / Getty Images
The only known way to loosen PFAS’ tight molecular bonds is to heat them to extreme temperatures — a minimum of 2,012 degrees F, according to the EPA. Many incinerators that burn sewage sludge after it goes through treatment don’t get that hot. Notably, the local Wheelabrator incinerator is only required to maintain an operating temperature of 1,500 degrees F.
But Saratoga Biochar’s proposed pilot plant would get blisteringly hot — hot enough to break down PFAS. Apy explained that the PFAS would first get separated from the biosolids in the pyrolysis step — when the sludge is heated in the absence of oxygen. At that point, the forever chemicals become gases, leaving the biochar itself relatively clean of PFAS — “We’re counting 99 percent or better,” he said. Then, as a gas, the PFAS would be sent to a thermal oxidizer that Apy said would operate at 2,300 degrees F, high enough to destroy the PFAS.
Apy isn’t the only one to herald biochar as a promising way to destroy PFAS.
Gerard Cornelissen, a researcher at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, began working on biochar in 2009 as a way to enrich soils and sequester carbon, and later came to see it as a way to help destroy the forever chemicals, which he called the “most pressing contaminant problem” in the world. In several scientific articles, Cornelissen has shown that pyrolysis can remove PFAS in biosolids and make them undetectable in the final biochar product, with less than 1 percent of the chemicals escaping in exhaust. Cornelissen said he’d feel comfortable if a biochar plant were built next door to him. Still, he cautioned that his team, operating on the cutting edge of analytical science, could measure only 56 of the more than 12,000 PFAS compounds. He noted that most techniques missed the smaller PFAS molecules (or “short chain” PFAS), which are likely to be less dangerous, but whose effects are still generally unknown — a concern also raised by Trabbic-Pointer.
“From all the integrity that I’ve got as a scientist, I think it’s the best we can do,” Cornelissen said. “But it’s not 100 percent perfect, either.”
Back at the DEC public comment hearing, Joe Peranio of Glens Falls was one of the few community members to bring up climate change during his time to speak — out of more than 500 public comments. “Something that we should all be able to agree upon is that we need to take serious action in the effort of cleaning up our planet,” he said, explaining that, among other things, he wanted to counter the false idea that “biochar is not a valid solution for mitigating climate change.”
The science on biochar’s carbon-removing abilities is “well established,” according to Cornelissen. Independent studies have shown that biochar sequesters about 50 percent of the carbon contained in plants — which, if burned or left to rot, would otherwise end up in the air as part of the natural carbon cycle. Biochar made from sewage sludge isn’t as well studied, but it has also been shown to sequester carbon. Apy shared an analysis by an environmental consulting firm that concluded the Saratoga Biochar plant would be carbon-negative.
However, in a letter on behalf of the Clean Air Action Network, Earthjustice attorney Michael Youhana and his team took aim at this analysis, arguing, among other objections, that whether or not the plant removes carbon depends on the biochar’s end use. They questioned whether using biochar in fertilizer really results in permanent carbon storage, writing, “the greenhouse gas implications of land application of biochar are highly uncertain.” Many academics, on the other hand, argue that biochar added to soil will sequester carbon semi-permanently. Biochar made by Indigenous people in the Amazon basin centuries ago is still holding its carbon firmly in place.
The Hudson River flows through Moreau Lake State Park. Times Union
Although most speakers at the DEC hearings didn’t bring up climate change by name, they did refer to New York’s landmark 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which aims to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Pyrolysis, the process that produces biochar, is characterized as a greenhouse gas net producer under the law — and projects involving pyrolysis are not eligible to generate state-certified carbon offsets. Furthermore, critics of Saratoga Biochar said the plant would violate an environmental justice provision in the law.
Youhana explained the act requires that “disadvantaged communities,” identified by the New York State Climate Justice Working Group as having a critical number of pollution and public health burdens, not be disproportionately burdened by the energy transition. Any project that increases net emissions of conventional pollutants in these communities is banned under the law. Although Moreau doesn’t meet the state’s definition of a disadvantaged community, neighboring Hudson Falls and Glens Falls do, and Earthjustice and the Clean Air Action Network argue Saratoga Biochar will waft additional air pollution into these towns. While Earthjustice has successfully fought industrial projects across New York state using this provision, including a natural gas plant in Queens, Saratoga Biochar is the first climate solution the group has challenged — an “important test case,” said Youhana.
Apy said that while he respects the Climate Leadership and Protection Act’s mandate, he is concerned that the law will slow progress on needed climate projects precisely where they are needed, along with green jobs. He also said there will not be any undue air pollution burden on the towns neighboring Moreau. Youhana argued that Saratoga Biochar’s calculations are a best-case scenario, creating additional burden on the community if something does go wrong.
Moreau Lake State Park in Saratoga County is a popular outdoor venue about 7 miles southwest of the proposed biochar plant. Times Union
No community wants to be a climate solution’s guinea pig, especially for an untested technology: No other biochar project in the country uses sewage sludge as the base of its product, and Saratoga Biochar has never built a small-scale version of the system it’s planning to use at its facility. The town would rely on pollution assessments from state environmental regulators, who require testing only every few years. And importantly, this type of plant has never been built at scale in the United States. What could persuade a town to take on that risk? Biochar from poop might be worth it for the climate, the country, and even the state — but what could make it worthwhile for the town of Moreau?
Johannes Lehmann, a Cornell University professor of soil biogeochemistry, is known as the biochar pioneer. He first began working on biochar as a method to improve soil fertility in the late 1990s, and he carried out seminal studies demonstrating that the material durably locks away carbon, introducing biochar as a carbon removal solution.
Lehmann declined to comment specifically on Saratoga Biochar, but he did offer an idea about win-win-win solutions — one that’s familiar to engineering students learning to serve communities. You don’t start with the technology, but rather with the problem, Lehmann said. “And then you work from how you can make this into a solution to serve the problem that people are having on this very localized level.”
By way of illustration, Lehmann described a project his Cornell team has developed for a dairy farmer near Ithaca. The project pyrolyzes cow manure into fertilizer and provides energy for the farm. It’s custom-built to address this farmer’s problems, and the end use for the biochar, as a soil additive, is under his control. But how can you scale this principle up to a town, a state, or a country? Particularly given, as Lehmann said, “You need to be able to articulate the problem, and most people can’t even do that.”
For Moreau, the local problem of what to do with PFAS-containing, greenhouse gas-emitting sewage sludge does need to be solved: Apy said sewage sludge removal in the Hudson Valley has the highest costs nationally, with landfills now charging $220 per ton, compared to roughly $100 four years ago. But Moreau’s residents are convinced that importing sewage from around the state and New England would not mitigate — only add to — their problems, particularly with a technology unproven at scale.
Ultimately, the DEC had similar concerns. In mid-November, the state agency sent a letter to Apy denying Saratoga Biochar’s three permit applications. The agency’s underlying argument was that Saratoga Biochar’s laboratory tests could not predict the impacts of a full-scale “permanent” plant. “While the proposed technology shows promise,” the DEC wrote, “there are too many unanswered questions about the effectiveness of the process and too little information about its safe implementation at an industrial scale.” The agency also determined that Saratoga Biochar could not claim carbon removal from biochar as an offset for the plant’s emissions under New York’s state climate law.
“We are jubilant that the DEC denied all permits for the disastrous sewage sludge biochar plant proposed in the town of Moreau,” Frisch wrote in a statement for the Clean Air Action Network. “This was the right decision.”
Purdue called the 500 public comments “critical” to the DEC decision. For her part, LeClair, founder of the Not Moreau Facebook page, credited the permit denial to her community’s activism. “This could never have happened if thousands of people of Moreau … and the surrounding communities had not supported it,” LeClair said, by collecting and signing petitions, planting yard signs, writing letters, doing research, and telling one another what they’d learned.
The fate of Saratoga Biochar shows all that can happen when an experimental technology that looks good on paper meets the neighbors — and when communities long responsible for taking on the burden of industrial waste are asked to take on still more. Even in the name of climate change.
Apy said that Saratoga Biochar would not appeal the DEC’s decision. Rather, he said, his company was looking to the future, focused on developing new projects in New York state: smaller-scale plants to be sited alongside municipal wastewater treatment facilities looking for “better outcomes for their biosolids.” Apy added, “We just want to get our technology out there and prove it.”
Beyond Gas (11/24): “We found indoor NO2 pollution levels from moderate gas stove use far above the health standard set by the EPA for outdoor exposure.”
It was the sort of feel-good, David-vs.-Goliath story that’s perfect ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
A coalition of DC-area faith, tenant and environmental groups spent two years studying the health impacts of gas stoves. Just ahead of the holiday, when countless families would be spending hours in their kitchens cooking turkey and fixings, the coalition released their report, and it was a shocker.
After running the gas oven and two burners for 30 minutes, nearly two-thirds of homes studied registered higher levels of nitrogen dioxide than the EPA health-protective standard.
Nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, is a gas linked to wide-ranging health problems, from asthma to heart issues, and possibly “tied to increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, as well as cognitive development and behavioral issues in children,” the report noted.
For the grassroots group, called the Beyond Gas Coalition, the most pressing message to get to families was how to lessen their exposure to NO2 by keeping windows open during and even after cooking with gas stoves.
Longer term, the group encourages localities to ban gas appliances in new construction—a step already taken by DC and Montgomery County, Maryland, the two jurisdictions Beyond Gas studied. (Those bans will take effect in 2027.)
Despite the timeliness of Beyond Gas’s findings, only two news outlets covered the release: the Washington Informer (11/22/24), a venerable Black newspaper, and WUSA9, the local CBS affiliate owned by the media conglomerate Tegna (formerly part of Gannett).
WUSA, in fact, produced no less than three stories on the day of the report’s release (Heated, 11/27/24). Unfortunately, WUSA’s stories were quickly followed by an about-face.
Yanked without explanation
WUSA‘s report (11/27/24) on the dangers of gas stoves disappeared from its website—then came back in a more industry-friendly form.
WUSA’s trio of pieces began running on the morning of November 21, but by that evening, two of the three links to its stories were broken. “I thought it was just a glitch or something,” Barbara Briggs, co-author of Beyond Gas’s report, told the climate newsletter Heated (11/27/24).
When [Beyond Gas] called up WUSA to inquire, they say the message they received from the producer who worked on the story was that the station made the decision at the behest of the utility company, choosing to pull the story down and hide the video from its YouTube channel until it could include a statement from Washington Gas.
Of course, Washington Gas was under no obligation to ever give a statement.
“[WUSA] essentially told Washington Gas, ‘We’ll kill the story, and let you decide when and whether we republish it,’” Mark Rodeffer, a member of Sierra Club’s DC chapter, told Heated‘s Emily Atkin. “It’s shocking to me that they’re letting one of their advertisers dictate stories.”
“Washington Gas has sponsored many WUSA environmental stories,” Heated reported, “most of which are designed to bolster the utility’s environmental reputation.”
While Washington Gas wasn’t initially named in WUSA’s main report, Scott Broom, the environmental reporter who produced the story, noted in his report the gas industry’s objection to findings linking NO2 exposure to negative health outcomes, as well as the industry’s lawsuits against DC and Montgomery County over banning gas appliances.
But Washington Gas apparently wasn’t happy with Broom’s story, and it was quietly yanked without explanation.
New and improved
Heated (11/27/24): “The incident raises questions about how much fossil fuel sponsorship is influencing environmental and public health journalism—both in the DC region and beyond.”
Then, just as suddenly, the story reappeared six days later (11/27/24), now with Washington Gas’s fingerprints all over it. An editor’s note affixed to the top read: “This story…has been updated to include additional research and sources regarding the safety of gas stoves.”
A more honest editor’s note might have read: “We changed this story to keep a sponsor happy.”
WUSA’s apparent accommodations to Washington Gas—a greedy local monopoly utility owned by the Canadian multinational AltaGas—started right at the top of the new story. Here’s the opening to Broom’s original story (which can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine):
As families prepare for Thanksgiving feasts, a new report highlights what studies show is a serious health hazard in the kitchen: gas stoves and ovens.
In the updated version, WUSA downgraded the health hazard from “serious” to merely “potential.”
Broom’s second paragraph initially stated that “a study” had “revealed” that nearly two-thirds of the gas-stove-kitchens tested exceeded standard NO2 levels. The updated version now says “a report” only “claims” this.
Further down, things got stranger. The new version contains a long tangent conveying a gas industry talking point that has nothing to do with the story.
“Gas appliances can play an important role in reducing health hazards in poor countries where people rely on dirtier fuels such as wood and kerosene,” WUSA reported, citing a study likely handed to it by Washington Gas.
Better than nothing?
You might think the advocates who spent two years working on their study would be outraged at WUSA. But the DC area’s local media scene is in such disrepair that any coverage, no matter how problematic, may be better than the all-too-common nothing.
“It’s not like public radio has done anything,” a resigned Briggs told Heated. “It’s not like any of the other stations have carried it.”
Solar panels and wind turbines give the world bountiful energy — but come with a conundrum. When it’s sunny and windy out, in many places these renewables produce more electricity than is actually needed at the time. Then when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing, those renewables provide little to no electricity when it’s sorely needed.
So for the grid of tomorrow to go 100 percent renewable, it needs to store a lot more energy. You’ve probably heard about giant lithium-ion batteries stockpiling that energy for later use. But when providing backup power, even a big battery bank will usually drain in four hours. The need for an alternative has the United States government, researchers, and startups scrambling to develop more “long-duration energy storage” that can provide a minimum of 10 hours of backup power — often by using reservoirs, caverns, and other parts of the landscape as batteries.
A new study from several universities and national labs in the United States and Canada shows that large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills. It looked specifically at the Western Interconnection, a chunk of the grid that includes the western U.S. and Canada, plus a bit of northern Mexico. The study found that building more long-duration energy storage there would reduce electricity prices by more than 70 percent in times of high demand.
“It’s like an orchestra,” said Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor of the paper published last month in the journal Nature Communications. “We need to think about all these factors, how they work. But bringing in more storage can only help in making this more cost-effective.”
The technologies already exist to hold renewable energy for at least half a day, with more on the way. One technique is known as pumped storage hydropower: When the grid is humming with renewable power, a facility pumps water uphill into a reservoir. Then, when solar or wind power drops off, the facility lets the water loose to flow back down into another reservoir, turning turbines that produce electricity. It’s exploiting energy from the wind and the sun, along with the power of gravity.
“Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important,” said Martin Staadecker, an energy systems researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study. “But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”
As of 2022, the U.S. had 43 pumped storage hydropower facilities with a combined generation capacity of 22 gigawatts. (For perspective, the U.S. has around 150 gigawatts of wind power and 140 gigawatts of solar.) According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has the potential to double its capacity for that kind of energy storage. In 2021, the Biden administration launched its Long Duration Storage Shot, part of the Energy Earthshots initiative, aiming to reduce the costs of the technology by 90 percent in a decade. And last year, it announced $325 million for 15 long-duration energy storage projects, including one that stores heat energy in concrete and others to make newfangled batteries made of iron, water, and air.
The researchers looked at long-duration energy storage without considering the particular technique involved, asking what would be the cheapest way to get the Western Interconnection to be 100 percent emissions-free. Their study found that long-duration energy storage would be particularly beneficial to a utility’s customers, reducing electricity costs in times of high demand on the grid, like in the late afternoon as people return home and switch on appliances at the same time that solar power on the grid is waning. More storage also means more backup power for ever-hotter heat waves, when whole regions flick on their AC units.
Companies are figuring out how to store energy underground, too. A company called Hydrostor, based in Toronto, Canada, uses excess renewable energy on the grid to pump compressed air into subterranean caverns filled with water. That forces the water aboveground into a reservoir. When the grid needs electricity, Hydrostor lets that water flow back into the chamber, pushing the air back to the surface to drive turbines. “We’re kind of creating a piston underground of water,” said Jon Norman, president of Hydrostor. “We’re actually building a cavity out using techniques that they use in the hydrocarbon storage industry to store propane and butane.”
If a region runs low on renewable power, like when the sun sets, it would have to import carbon-free electricity from elsewhere. But that requires transmission lines that cut through hundreds or thousands of miles of land, which are difficult to get approved and expensive to build. The new study found that it would cost between $83 billion and $130 billion to deploy the amount of long-duration energy storage in the modeling — depending on how the price of the technology declines as it matures.
With long-duration energy storage, utilities can deploy more solar panels and wind turbines locally and store up their energy, rather than having to ship it from somewhere else. Kevin Schneider, an electrical engineer who studies the grid at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory but wasn’t involved in the new research, said that could reduce the significant costs of building long-distance transmission lines. “Getting that flexibility in the system, where you can have a reservoir of electricity that you can store up and then release, that’s what allows us to not have to build as much infrastructure, and also be a little bit more resilient.”
The grid of tomorrow, then, may hum with renewable energy stored both in giant battery banks, but also stored in the landscape itself. Solar and wind power would be wasted no more.
For years, large drillers in California sold unprofitable wells to smaller companies willing to wring the last drops of oil out of them. The process essentially kicked the cost of cleaning up oil fields — pumping concrete down well bores, removing tanks and pipelines — to operators with less ability to pay for the eventual cleanup.
Policymakers and advocates predicted that taxpayers — not the oil companies themselves — would ultimately have to pay billions for remediation once those oil and gas operations ran dry. Unplugged wells emit climate-warming methane and pose long-term hazards to soil and groundwater.
But a new law may finally be slowing the so-called well shuffling, state data shows.
Since the start of this year, companies have proposed selling 766 wells in the state. But before the wells can change hands, purchasers are now required to request an estimate for a bond to plug the wells from the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), the agency that regulates drilling.
The requirement is part of a new law passed last year to ensure that someone — not taxpayers — is forced to put up the money to clean up the wells before they can be sold.
The state quoted bond amounts totaling $80.5 million for those hundreds of wells. Most of that money was for a bond to eventually plug 729 wells in Kern County that Vaquero Energy Inc. wanted to buy from Aera Energy.
The remaining 37 wells are scattered across Santa Barbara, Orange, Kern, Fresno, and Los Angeles counties and are owned by two dozen companies. The majority of those wells were idle, and nearly all were marginal — producing less than 15 barrels of oil a day, enough to produce just 472 gallons of gas.
But after the state determined how much it would cost to bond those wells, all 37 of the proposed sales fell through. The California Geologic Energy Management Division directed questions about the failed transactions to the involved companies.
To Rob Schuwerk, the executive director of Carbon Tracker’s North American office, it means that the law is working as intended: Companies are no longer passing off marginal wells to operators who lack the financial means to plug them.
“The law has stopped some of the bleeding,” Schuwerk wrote in an email to Capital & Main.
Capital & Main reached out to all of the operators involved in the proposed sale of wells. Most did not respond to emails and phone calls.
Chad Hathaway, the owner of Hathaway LLC, wanted to buy 14 wells from Kern River Holding LLC. The state required that he file a $2.6 million bond to complete the transaction. His company in the Mount Poso oil field in Kern County specializes in refurbishing and reactivating marginal wells.
In an email to Capital & Main, Hathaway wrote that California “places such high costs on abandonment and remediation that it makes the transfers impossible, unaffordable, and economically unfeasible to bond.” He noted that the state’s bonding estimates run much higher than his company’s internal estimates.
That sentiment is shared by other operators. Signal Hill Disposal LLC, a wastewater disposal company based in Southern California, responded with “shock and awe” after the California Geologic Energy Management Division said it needed to obtain a $651,820 bond to acquire a single well in Los Angeles County, according to division emails obtained by Capital & Main.
The quoted amounts to plug wells are, however, in line with and even a little below figures included in a Sierra Club idle wells report released in December 2023 that is frequently cited by some lawmakers in Sacramento. That report put total cleanup liabilities for all unplugged wells in California at $22.9 billion.
A Carbon Tracker report from 2023 estimated that the costs of decommissioning all those wells would be more than double the projected cash flows for all oil-producing companies in California given how much oil is left in the ground.
Going forward, Carbon Tracker’s Schuwerk said, California needs “to increase financial assurance on all entities,” which he said could be accomplished through bonds or sinking funds, which can be dedicated to cleanup costs and which oil operators pay into over time.
But any plan to clean up oil fields through bonds alone faces a major hurdle: Bond sellers have become reluctant to work with California oil operators, said Mark Karr, a senior account manager with SuretyBonds.com.
“Out of all the bonds we sell, this is one of the highest risk industries,” Karr said. “A lot of surety companies think it’s not even worth it because we’ve had to pay out so many times” to the state after oil operators reneged on promises to use their own money for plugging wells.
The state’s largest operators, including Chevron, may be best positioned to set aside cleanup money, considering their still very profitable global operations. But actions by driller Aera Energy, which recently merged with California Resources Corporation to become the state’s largest well operator, show how challenging it can be to make companies put up a sufficient bond.
In one proposed transaction this year, Aera asked the California Geologic Energy Management Division for a bond estimate to sell 11 wells to an unidentified company. In another, where Aera wanted to sell 729 wells to Vaquero Energy, it’s not clear which company initiated the transaction.
The bond amounts for the two transactions would have totaled $75.3 million, but neither moved forward. Neither Aera or Vaquero responded to requests for comment.
And months before its shareholders voted in June to acquire Aera, California Resources Corporation told state regulators that its stock transfer acquisition of Aera meant no wells were actually changing hands. The California Geologic Energy Management Division agreed with the company’s interpretation of the law, and did not force California Resources Corporation to file a bond for acquiring Aera’s wells.
California Resources Corporation estimated in financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its long-term costs for cleaning up all of its unplugged wells after the merger — about 38,000 — amounted to $1 billion. By contrast, the Sierra Club estimated that the two companies’ liabilities to plug their idle wells amounted to $3.5 billion combined.
California Resources Corporation filed a $30 million bond for cleanup costs with the state in December 2023, the maximum amount under the law at the time.
Meanwhile, the state is taking more steps to hold companies financially liable for their wells. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law to charge companies thousands of dollars per idle well annually unless they start plugging them.
Despite President-elect Trump’s desire to promote domestic oil production, the federal government may find it difficult to intervene in matters related to drilling on state lands.
“It does not in any immediate way intersect with federal law or implicate federal interests,” said Ann Alexander, an environmental attorney and policy consultant who advocated for the oil well bonding law.
The bonding law is a step in the right direction, but California needs to continue finding ways to make oil operators pay for cleanup, Alexander said. Other industries could serve as a model, such as the nuclear power sector, in which plant operators are required by federal regulations to put money into a sinking fund for decommissioning.
“No matter how much people want to keep [California’s oil drilling] industry alive, it is fundamentally on the wane,” she said.
A large raucous protest put criticism of Canada’s most damaging international accord back on the public radar.
In response to the opening of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary Parliamentary Assembly in Montreal 1,500 protested Friday to “Block NATO”. The main banner at the front of the night march stated: “Block NATO: Reject Militarism, Imperialism & Colonialism”. For weeks my neighbourhood was plastered with posters saying “Bloquons L’OTAN”. The Convergence des Luttes anti-capitaliste (CLAC) also produced a sticker with that message and a 16-page anti-NATO paper.
The image at the centre of their material was a boot stepping on NATO. That image, CLAC’s militant history, starting the march at night and a large student strike led to a raucous march. Some protesters probably intended to break windows at the convention centre hosting the NATO meeting. The police initially blamed protesters for setting fires in two cars but it appears tear gas canisters fired by the police were responsible. They must have fired many canisters as I tasted tear gas two blocks away from where the conflict escalated. Beyond the chemical irritants ingested by protesters and passersby, the police injured a handful of protesters.
While I’ve generally been opposed or ambivalent towards property destruction at demonstrations, Friday’s window breaking drew significant attention to a message rarely heard in recent years. A Radio Canada headline after the night march read “Une manifestation pour le retrait du Canada de l’OTAN dégénère à Montréal” (A demonstration calling for Canada’s withdrawal from NATO degenerates in Montreal) while La Presse noted, “Une manifestation contre l’OTAN dérape au centre-ville de Montréal” (Anti-NATO demonstration goes off the rails in downtown Montreal). The Associated Press, Reuters, Aljazeera and other international media reported on the protests.
The Mouvement québécois pour la paix’s march planned for the next day received significant coverage. About 150 marched against the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on Saturday with a L’actualité headline noting “Une autre manifestation contre l’OTAN a eu lieu samedi” (Another demonstration against NATO took place on Saturday) and Global News stating, “Anti-NATO protesters in Montreal demand Canada withdraws from alliance”. The Globe and Mail, New York Post and many other outlets published stories about the NATO Assembly with photographs of banners or placards criticizing NATO.
On Sunday multiple media showed up to the counter summit organized by the Canada Wide Peace and Justice Network. Radio Canada’s flagship Téléjournal covered it with their blurb stating, “Demonstrations in opposition to NATO were numerous this weekend on the sidelines of its annual summit in Montreal. Several groups believe the Atlantic Alliance harms global security instead of strengthening it and urge Canada to leave NATO.”
The media attention is important. Despite the alliance being mentioned regularly, there’s almost no hint of criticism of NATO in the dominant media.
The scale and militancy of the protests was due to the fact they coincided with a major student strike for Palestine. Over 40 associations representing 85,000 students across Quebec voted to strike on Thursday and Friday to call on their institutions to end all relations with Israel. Many condemned NATO assistance for Israel and an Israeli delegation led by genocidal Likud Knesset member Boaz Bismuth at the Parliamentary Assembly. Israel has a longstanding partnership with the alliance.
Student strikers targeting NATO is an indication that the popular uprising against Israel’s genocide may be broadening its outlook towards challenging Canadian foreign policy and imperialism. Canada’s support for Israeli violence makes a mockery of Ottawa’s claims to advance human rights or international law. Is it believable that genocide Justin and Joe truly care about Ukrainian sovereignty or people?
One needn’t support Russian militarism to be troubled by NATO’s escalation. Providing logistical and intelligence support for Ukraine to fire NATO missiles deep into Russia is dangerous brinkmanship.
NATO is a belligerent alliance pushing Canada to increase its military spending. This weekend’s protests may not have “blocked NATO” but they definitely thrust opposition to the alliance into the spotlight.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
A lawsuit is challenging how the state of Michigan plans to approve large renewable energy projects, just weeks before a new law is set to go into effect.
About 80 townships and counties are suing the Public Service Commission, the state’s energy regulators, over how it plans to grant siting permissions to renewable projects. The suit, filed November 8, could shape how, and where, solar, wind, and battery storage are developed — and it muddies the process for projects to be approved in the meantime.
Last year, Michigan’s Democrat-controlled Legislature passed a bundle of ambitious climate policies, including changes to the application process for large renewable projects. One of those laws, Public Act 233, allows the state to greenlight utility-scale renewables — like solar arrays of at least 50 megawatts — that in the past could have been slowed or blocked by local governments. The bill passed on promises that it would help meet clean energy goals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing developers with additional paths forward.
Renewable energy advocates had high hopes that it would mark a turning point for Michigan, which has a deep history of local control. In crafting PA 233, lawmakers followed the example of states like Illinois that in recent years have worked to streamline permitting and curtail local governments’ power to restrict renewables.
“I think there was a huge amount of relief on the part of landowners, who have had options agreements and contracts to participate in wind and solar projects, but have been blocked from getting lease payments, essentially, by local governments,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Eisenson has argued for regulators to clarify Michigan’s law to ensure projects are protected from local restrictions. According to the Sabin Center, by the end of 2023, at least 22 clean energy projects had been stalled throughout the state by local governments (though some have since moved forward) and at least seven townships had placed severe restrictions on developing industrial solar in areas zoned for agricultural use.
Critics of the law, meanwhile, allege that it wrests control away from the people who live in these areas, and the local governments that know what’s best for their communities.
Legal challenges to Michigan’s new climate laws weren’t exactly unexpected; an effort to repeal the siting law entirely failed earlier this year, because organizers didn’t collect enough signatures to put it to a vote. But this latest appeal in Michigan has gained national attention, with the climate news site Heatmap News writing that it may be “the most important legal challenge for the renewables industry in America.”
The lawsuit is challenging the Public Service Commission’s plans to implement the renewable siting law, not the law itself. And as other states consider permitting reform — and whether to keep big renewable projects under local or state control — such legal actions could be easier than trying to repeal an entire law, Eisenson said: “There are more options.”
This latest legal challenge was filed after the Public Service Commission announced how the new law for approving project sites would work — a process that involved months of public engagement by the commission in an effort to clarify the rules, including what, exactly, local governments need to have on the books to get the first say on a proposed project.
The lawsuit says the commission’s regulators didn’t follow the proper rulemaking procedures to issue such requirements, and that they undermined the local control that’s baked into PA 233. In particular, the suit challenges the commission’s definition of a “compatible renewable energy ordinance” — a local law that complies with specific state guidelines. PA 233 stipulates that renewable project developers first apply locally as long as the government has a compatible ordinance. If that local ordinance is more restrictive than state law, developers can instead apply directly to the state for approval.
That left some big questions.
Sarah Mills, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan who researches how renewable energy impacts rural communities, said while parts of PA 233 are clear — such as the sections on setbacks, fencing, height, and sound — others are murky.
“There’s a whole bunch of things that are traditionally regulated for renewable energy projects that are not mentioned in the law,” she said, like whether local governments can require trees and bushes or ground cover.
The Public Service Commission claims that for a local ordinance to be compatible, it can’t include restrictions on things not included in the law. The plaintiffs behind the appeal disagree.
“That’s not the state of the law, and frankly, it rewrites the legislation, because it doesn’t say that,” said Michael Homier, an attorney with the firm Foster Swift Collins & Smith, who is representing the plaintiffs.
What it comes down to, Homier said, is the scope of the commission’s authority: While he acknowledges regulators can still weigh in on applications, the suit challenges the commission’s broader interpretation of how the law should work.
A commission spokesperson said they couldn’t comment.
Under the commission’s order, only the local government that is zoning a renewable project needs to be considered when granting an approval. But the lawsuit argues that when more than one jurisdiction is affected — like when a county overlaps with a township — both entities should be included in the decision-making.
Mills points out this would affect how much money would flow to local communities from these projects. The state’s law says communities where large projects are located would receive $2,000 per megawatt, along with any required legal fees, which the developer would pay.
“If the affected local unit of government isn’t only the zoning jurisdiction, then the developer would need to pay $2,000 to the county and to the township. So it would be $4,000 per megawatt,” Mills said, in which case “developers are going to have to pay more money.”
Those represented in the appeal are a minority of local jurisdictions; Michigan has 83 counties and more than 1,200 townships. Many are to the south and around the agricultural region in the east colloquially called “The Thumb,” though a few are farther north.
Watchdog groups that track efforts to oppose renewable energy projects say legal challenges are part of coordinated opposition to such development.
“The lawsuit is an extension of ongoing efforts by anti-renewables interests to thwart clean energy in Michigan, and seeks to open the door to poison-pill local rules that effectively prohibit renewables development,” said researcher Jonathan Kim of the Energy and Policy Institute in an email.
In Michigan, debates over large-scale clean energy projects have been acrimonious, and have had consequences for elected officials. Douglass Township, with a population of a little over 2,200, held a recall election in 2022 — part of a wave of unrest in Montcalm County driven by opposition to renewables. “So our community was totally behind us working on ordinances that would protect them from industrialized wind and solar energy,” said Cindy Shick, who won the race for township supervisor as part of the recall.
The state’s recent siting law drastically diminished the local control they had crafted, according to Shick, and the commission’s order eroded it even further, which is why the township joined the lawsuit.
Reasons for opposing utility-scale renewable projects vary widely, from concerns about a loss of agricultural land to the effects such developments would have on the environment. Other critics point out that companies too often fail to consult tribal nations and ignore Indigenous rights when pursuing projects.
Still, others in support of more development say it’s a boon to communities and people looking to make money by leasing their land. Clyde Taylor, 84, is a farmer who grows hay in Isabella Township in central Michigan. The township is among those suing, though Taylor hasn’t looked into the lawsuit.
He’s allowing a company to build a solar array on around two dozen acres of his land. While he has “mixed feelings” about the state’s new siting law, he generally supports it.
“We have to have laws on the books to make this thing fly,” he said, referring to renewable energy adoption. “And they’ve made it fair enough,” with solar projects under 50 megawatts staying in local control.
Ultimately, the local governments involved in the lawsuit are asking the Court of Appeals to cancel at least part of the commission’s order. The law is set to go into effect on November 29. If the appeal is successful at halting the Public Service Commission from implementing the order, it’s unclear how PA 233 would work as the suit moves through the court, a process that could take more than a year.
This coverage is made possible through a partnershipbetween Grist and Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms providingessential journalism in underserved communities and ensuring its long-term growth andsustainability.
President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to kill offshore wind energy development “on day one” of his second term is already triggering project slowdowns on the East Coast, but the biggest wind farm proposed in the Gulf of Mexico will likely stay on track.
That’s because the project is on such a long development timeline that Trump’s four-year term will be over before permitting and construction begin, according to RWE, the German energy giant that plans to build a 2,000-megawatt wind farm about 40 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The project, which could power more than 350,000 homes, isn’t expected to be operational for about a decade.
“The project has a long-lead development timeline that is longer than any one federal administration, and with a planned operational date in the mid-2030s,” RWE spokesman Ryan Ferguson said.
RWE, the world’s second-largest offshore wind developer, and other key players in the renewable energy industry announced shifts in funding priorities and warned of project delays and possible derailments after Trump was elected president this month.
“The change of administration in the U.S entails risks for the timely implementation of offshore wind projects,” RWE Chief Financial Officer Michael Muller said at a press conference earlier this month. “The new Republican administration could delay specific projects. The realization of our Community Offshore Wind project near New York, for example, depends on outstanding permits from U.S. federal authorities.”
The “higher risks and delays” in the U.S. offshore wind market prompted RWE to initiate a $1.6 billion share buyback, RWE CEO Markus Krebber said during a call with investors. The buyback signaled a significant shift in the company’s short-term spending priorities but not waning confidence in the durability of U.S. demand for renewables, Muller said, noting that a growing number of states are setting goals for solar and wind energy.
RWE’s recalibration makes sense, said Jenny Netherton, the Southeastern Wind Coalition’s Louisiana program manager.
“That was not unexpected,” she said. “Companies are always trying to find the best way forward in an uncertain environment.”
Trump’s opposition to offshore wind began in 2006, when he initiated a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over a proposed wind farm the future U.S. president said would spoil the view from a golf course he hoped to build. Trump lost the battle and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees. In recent speeches, Trump has said wind farms harm property values and wildlife. More outlandishly, he has claimed wind energy causes cancer, increases food prices and prevents people from watching TV when the wind isn’t blowing.
During his first term, Trump was accused of “slow walking” the permits for some of the first offshore wind farms in federal waters. RWE and other companies say wind farms already under construction will likely move forward, but projects slated to break ground over the next couple years may face setbacks.
Of the 30 states with offshore wind potential, nine have statewide wind energy mandates. Two states — Massachusetts and Rhode Island — have deadlines to reach wind energy targets in the 2020s and four states — New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia — have deadlines in the 2030s.
These goals and the U.S.’s ever-rising electricity needs are signs that Trump may slow but not kill wind energy development, Muller said.
“We still believe U.S. offshore wind [energy] is still needed,” he said, noting New York in particular. “If they are going to keep up with demand, they need offshore wind.”
Louisiana set a goal of developing the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, but the target wasn’t legally binding. Proposed in 2021 during the administration of Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, the goal appears to have been abandoned by Governor Jeff Landry, who took office in January. The Republican governor has said little publicly about offshore wind development and has not responded to requests seeking his position on the matter.
Many other Louisiana Republicans strongly back offshore wind, seeing it as an economic boon for the state. Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry have seen business flag in recent years. Several of them, including shipbuilders, engineering firms and metal fabricators, have easily transitioned to helping plan and build offshore projects on the East Coast, including the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm.
Bipartisan legislation in Louisiana paved the way for a fast-tracked approval process for wind projects in state-managed waters, which extend 3 miles from the coast. Louisiana has approved agreements with two companies to build small-scale wind farms near Cameron Parish and Port Fourchon, the Gulf’s largest oil and gas port. The two projects will likely be built years before the RWE wind farm.
The last federal lease auction in the Gulf was canceled in July due to weak interest from bidders, but two companies recently offered competing plans for a 142,000-acre area near Galveston, Texas. It’s unclear how Trump’s victory will affect those proposals. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is waiting to see if there’s more developer interest in the area and will likely initiate a competitive lease sale in the coming months.
While Trump may cause uncertainty at the federal level, Louisiana isn’t likely to waver in its support for offshore wind energy, Netherton said.
“It still enjoys broad support here,” she said. “Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”
In October, the Bureau of Land Management finalized a new resource management plan for Colorado’s Western Slope that will determine how 2 million acres of public land are managed for the next 15-20 years.
The plan includes some conservation wins; it sets aside land designated as critical habitat, for example, and institutes extra protections for big game. But it also permits continued leasing in areas that have moderate and high potential for oil and gas development — with a particular focus on places with the unique geological conditions necessary for helium production.
Helium is a noble gas, meaning it is chemically inert and doesn’t react with other substances. These qualities mean that it’s in high demand for a variety of critical uses in medical technology, diving and national defense; diagnostic procedures like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for example, and nuclear detection systems, including neutron detectors, all depend on helium. Currently, there are no synthetic substitutes for the gas that can replicate its low boiling point and low reactivity.
While some helium is reused in some scientific areas, broader adoption of recycling is still limited by cost and infrastructure barriers. Some biotech companies are developing helium-free MRI systems and systems that use helium reclamation units, but helium remains an essential resource that many technologies need. And the world’s supply of the gas is rapidly dwindling.
Sections of the Book Cliffs north of Grand Junction, Colorado, are identified as a low-potential gas drilling area, but also have helium drilling potential.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News with support from EcoFlight
This scarcity has put increasing pressure on federal public lands to produce a resource essential to industry and national security. Helium is nonrecoverable: Once it’s released, it escapes into the atmosphere and eventually into space. According to the BLM, it is “a nonrenewable resource found in recoverable quantities in only a few locations around the world; many of these are being depleted.”
In its final plan for western Colorado, the BLM proposes closing 543,300 acres in the Grand Junction Field Office to oil and gas leasing, but keeping 692,300 open, including about 165,700 acres that have been identified for helium recovery. A BLM spokesperson said that the nation’s shrinking helium reserves influenced the management plan: “The final decision on this plan to keep the helium area open to future leasing was based on helium’s rarity and strategic importance.”
Keely Meehan, policy director for the Colorado Wildlands Project, a nonprofit focused on protecting public lands managed by the BLM, criticized the plan for prioritizing resource extraction over preserving critical habitat.
“The environmental impacts and the impact to habitat and species is the same as for oil and gas,” said Meehan. “It disrupts habitat connectivity.”
The sensitive areas in question include migration corridors and seasonal ranges essential for species such as mule deer, elk, pronghorn and bighorn sheep, as well as habitat that the threatened Gunnison sage grouse relies on for breeding, nesting and feeding.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, which conducted a survey of helium resources across the country, there is plenty of recoverable helium available — approximately 306 billion cubic feet, or about 150 years of supply at the 2020 U.S. production level, which comes to about 2.15 billion cubic feet annually. It’s unclear how much of that helium is found on federal public lands. Helium tends to occur naturally in natural gas reservoirs, and since federal public lands in the West account for a significant share of natural gas production, much of the U.S.’s helium reserves likely reside on public lands.
Some rural western Colorado communities, many of which have historically depended on resource extraction, welcome the prospect of ongoing helium production. The Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado (AGNC), a council of city and county governments in that part of the state, advocated for opening the area to helium extraction in public comments to the agency, citing the potential economic benefits.
“Helium possesses substantial economic potential and could potentially serve as a vital resource in supporting communities grappling with impending economic challenges,” the AGNC wrote in the comments.
Other communities disagree, however, and the plan revealed the ongoing tension between rural communities that depend on resource extraction and those that rely on outdoor recreation, such as Pitkin and Eagle counties. The Mountain Pact, a coalition of local elected officials from over 100 mountain communities with outdoor recreation-based economies, argued in public comments that leaving the helium leases open would be detrimental to the natural resources that attract tourism dollars and investment.
“Protected public lands are tremendous assets to Western Colorado communities,” the Mountain Pact wrote to the BLM in a public comment. “They play a critical role in our way of life. They help make the communities where we live what they are while contributing to a healthier and better tomorrow for future generations.
In addition to the on-the-ground impacts of helium production, which echo those of natural gas extraction, opponents also brought up concerns about processing. Helium is separated from natural gas through a cryogenic process that uses cooling and pressure changes, which require energy, often from natural gas.
Western Colorado currently lacks a facility that can process helium, however, and conservationists fear that building one, together with the necessary roads and other infrastructure, would disrupt wildlife habitat and potentially remove some parcels from consideration for future wilderness protections.
“We’re really concerned about these wild places,” said Meehan, “and protecting areas that are currently not developed. There are really high-priority wildlands in this area, as well as high-priority habitat.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says changes to Australia’s $230 billion sovereign wealth fund will help plug a gap in funding for green projects amid the country’s transition to net zero. On Thursday, Mr Chalmers revealed unprecedented plans for a Future Fund investment mandate to support the “energy transition”, as well as other national priorities like housing….
In the constellation of renewable energy technologies that the U.S. has sought to deploy in order to battle climate change, offshore wind has had perhaps the rockiest path in recent years. In 2023, high interest rates and the global supply chain shocks brought a slew of developments across the country to an end. Even without these macroeconomic obstacles, offshore wind is a mammoth undertaking. It’s difficult to overstate the sheer scale of the endeavor that is the construction of an offshore wind farm. The largest turbines are the length of football fields and require specially built ships to transport them.
If offshore wind can take off anywhere, it’s New England, whose waters provide the highest wind capacity factor (the amount of energy a turbine can produce over time) in the continental U.S. In October 2023, three states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — signed a first-of-its-kind multistate procurement agreement to collectively share the costs and benefits of adding new offshore wind generation. The vision behind the plan was to reduce the cost per megawatt of the electricity generated. So far, the results of this deal have been uneven: two of the states have selected developers for new projects, but Connecticut has not.
But the election of Donald Trump could arrest the region’s momentum before it has had a genuine chance to take off. Trump has made a point of demonizing the technology (“I hate wind,” he is reported to have bluntly told oil and gas executives at a fundraiser) and has repeatedly made false claims about its impact on wildlife. In a campaign rally in May, Trump pledged to ensure that offshore wind projects come to a halt “on day one” of his second term. That could have been mere campaign-trail bluster, but of the clean energy technologies that the Inflation Reduction Act flooded money into, offshore wind is perhaps the most vulnerable to an unfriendly president.
In addition to the political calculations, the question of whether this coalition of states can build and deploy the offshore wind projects amounts to a test of American industrial capacity. To bolster the case to state governments for doubling down, there is growing support in the region from a somewhat unlikely corner: New England’s industrial unions, a group of whom published a report last week, in partnership with the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, outlining an ambitious vision for supplying the region with not only offshore wind turbines but a locally based industrial manufacturing base to support it.
“This entire industry that we’re trying to get launched has thousands and thousands of job opportunities, whether you’re talking about port construction or port renovations to make sure that offshore wind can be developed at a larger scale, whether you’re talking about component manufacturing, whether you’re talking about vessel manufacturing — all of these things are going to be critically important,” said Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. “We’re not talking about just individual energy projects. We’re talking about developing an entire energy industry and everything that goes into it.”
At a launch event for the report on Tuesday, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said the unions’ proposal “supports the region’s continued progress building a robust, worker-centered offshore wind industry. This is an incredible opportunity to lower costs and create good jobs for working people in our region while achieving energy independence, cleaner air and a climate-resilient future.”
There are just three operational wind farms in the country. According to Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington research firm, those power stations generate only about 200 megawatts of electricity — a fraction of the 50 gigawatts (50,000 megawatts) that states have committed to building, if their renewable energy targets are tallied together. The federal government has approved leases for wind projects that would generate 15 gigawatts of energy, and the onus now is on states to build the turbines — and to require their utility companies to buy electricity from it.
The Climate Jobs National Resource Center’s report calls for building 9 gigawatts of offshore wind energy in the waters off Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts by 2030 — scaling up to 30 gigawatts by 2040, and 60 gigawatts by 2050.
To meet these goals, the report suggests states employ “a climate and jobs strategy, built around new investments, active government facilitation of industry growth, and reliance on a skilled union workforce.” It argues offshore wind’s success will depend on a combination of investment in the region’s ports, regionally based component manufacturing, domestically built installation vessels, coordinated transmission planning between the states involved, and strong labor standards.
To maximize the benefits of offshore wind, the three states will need to coordinate their efforts on a range of tasks, from building transmission lines (which often requires tricky interstate negotiations) to collective procurement — and that’s one area where, Crowley argued, unions are uniquely positioned to help, by leveraging the power of their mass membership across state borders and political influence in Democratic state governments.
“There isn’t another organization except the labor movement that has a presence in all of these states in such a way that, if my counterpart in New York, Vinny Alvarez, calls up and says, ‘Patrick, there’s a hearing at the Rhode Island Coastal Resource Management Council about a transmission line for a project that we’re doing. Can you get a couple of people to go testify?’ — ‘Absolutely.’ And we’re there within hours,” Crowley said.
As an example of this leadership in action, Crowley cited the tri-state procurement agreement, which he described as “a paradigm shift in thinking that I don’t think would be possible except for the labor movement pushing this agenda.” He cast the agreement as a departure from the standard practice by which states attract investment and industry: “All of these states compete with each other when it comes to the economic marketplace,” Crowley said.
“We’re dealing with something right here in Rhode Island,” he continued. “One of our major employers, Hasbro Toys, is being courted by Massachusetts to move up from Providence up to Cambridge to move their headquarters there; we might lose a thousand jobs and Massachusetts will gain them. We’re not going to stop that kind of competition. But when we can eliminate it from the beginning, at the beginning of this industry — oh my God. This is a total economic paradigm shift that I don’t think folks have fully digested yet.”
But to get the unions’ vision past the finish line, especially against the headwinds of an unfriendly federal government, will be no easy feat — and crucially depends on private investment. This is also somewhere that Crowley believes unions can play a role. “The labor movement, through our pension funds, has access to a vast amount of investable capital,” he said. “And maybe what we’ve got to do is be creative about how we can leverage the funds that are in our pension systems, both private and public sector, to be a funding mechanism for developing this industry.”
Jeff Plaisted, an electrician in Massachusetts, worked on the crew that laid six miles of cable from the Vineyard Wind wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard to a power substation on Cape Cod, passing under the streets of the town of Hyannis.
“Since the Vineyard Wind project broke ground, and that project really got off the ground,” Plaisted said, “we had full employment in Local 223” — southeastern Massachusetts’ branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, of which Plaisted is now the business agent and organizer of membership development.
The project brought an unusual amount of work to the region. “We had travelers from other jurisdictions coming and signing our book to work in our jurisdiction because we needed the manpower from outside what we had to offer just to fill the job calls. That substation in Hyannis had 70 to 80 electricians on, and we very rarely see jobs in our jurisdiction that require that kind of manpower,” Plaisted said.
When Plaisted began working on the Vineyard Wind project, “What surprised me personally is the magnitude, the size of the turbines themselves,” he said. The job itself was a far cry from the normal work of a union electrician. “You’re not just stripping wires. The splicing operations, everything involved with it is highly skilled and very technical. The guys that are offshore, they’re taking a boat to work, five-plus hours offshore,” Plaisted said.
He is part of a growing number of union leaders who have spent the Biden years making the case that organized labor will need to play a starring role in the nationwide transition away from fossil fuels — not just in offshore wind, but in the vast landscape of industrial work, from electric vehicles to transmission buildout, that the transition will require.
Plaisted said that trade unions are reckoning with the fact that “climate change, it’s not a theory. It’s an actual thing, it’s not a belief system, it’s an issue that we’re going to have to deal with. If the goal is to get off fossil fuels, then everything should be brought to the table — solar, wind, battery. And union labor is the way to make those things happen,” Plaisted said.
Their efforts were bolstered in some respects by Biden’s attachment of labor-friendly requirements to many of the grants for clean energy, as well as an unusually friendly National Labor Relations Board. But unions now face a set of strategic decisions around how to engage with a Republican administration expected to be far less friendly to organized labor. “We’re at a crossroads,” Brothers said.
Under a new Trump administration, unions’ efforts may be directed more locally. “We’ll fight in Congress and in the halls of agencies,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the Bluegreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental organizations, in an interview before the election. “But I would expect our members and the members of our partners to be in the streets more, in the fullest sense of that term, and on the shop floor, and working much more in state capitals, while not taking our eyes off of all the dangerous actions that a Trump administration would pursue.”
The search for an energy alternative to fossil fuels has renewed interest in nuclear power production across the globe. Despite nuclear boosters’ promotion of the energy source, Tim Judson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service calls nuclear power an “elaborate greenwashing scheme.” Nuclear is “not carbon-free,” says Diné organizer Leona Morgan, who highlights the fuel costs and environmental contamination — particularly within and around Indigenous communities in the southwest United States — of the uranium mining required to produce nuclear power. Because the carbon costs before and after nuclear generation are not factored into energy calculations, says Morgan, “it’s really not going to solve the energy crisis.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Tech companies are turning to nuclear to fulfill the skyrocketing energy needs of artificial intelligence, with major corporations like Amazon, Google and Microsoft announcing plans to invest in nuclear power. But the speed at which energy needs are growing may not align with the construction or revitalization of nuclear infrastructure, says Alex de Vries, who researches the unintended consequences of AI and cryptocurrencies. There may be a “mismatch between the needs of tech companies today” and the future, while nuclear power continues to carry the same safety risks that led to its phasing out in the first place.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
As we broadcast all week from the COP29 talks in Azerbaijan, we look at what Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. president means for the climate. Clean energy and environmental advocates are raising alarm over Trump’s picks for key roles in his administration, including fracking magnate Chris Wright to serve as energy secretary and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to lead the Interior Department, where he could greatly expand drilling on federal lands. Burgum, a major ally of the fossil fuel industry, was also tapped to head a newly created National Energy Council aimed at increasing oil and gas production. For more on the White House transition, we speak with Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Natural Resources Defense Council Action. He calls Trump’s picks “deeply troubling” but says there is still room for optimism. “The clean energy transition in the United States is unstoppable. It’s going to hit some speed bumps now, but it will move forward,” says Bapna.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
A significant shift is underway in the electric car segment. No, I’m not talking about the shift to EVs. That’s still progressing despite a few manufacturers getting cold feet. What I’m referring to here is a subtle change in the makeup of EV batteries that carries some significant implications.
A type of lithium-ion battery called lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, is becoming increasingly prevalent in EVs around the world. Manufacturers like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Rivian, Tesla, and others are now offering these packs as an alternative to, or an outright replacement for, the nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) and nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA) chemistries that have dominated for years. While LFP cells made up just 6 percent of the market in 2020, they’ve now jumped to roughly 30 percent.
What do all these obscure elements — and dizzying series of acronyms — really mean, and what’s the significance for the vehicles that will hit the road over the next few years? Let’s dig into the details.
Batteries have three major components: anode, cathode, and electrolyte. When there’s a draw created in an electrical circuit — for example, when you press your EV’s “on” button — a chemical reaction occurs within the battery. Negative ions travel between anode and cathode, across the electrolyte, to generate current. It’s the cathode that determines the battery’s behavior, including its temperature resilience, energy density, and overall lifespan.
When we talk about lithium-ion chemistries, we’re really talking about the materials that make up the cathode, which in an LFP battery is literally lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4). More significant, though, is what’s missing from an LFP cathode.
LFP batteries have a few key advantages, but for anyone who’s concerned about the environmental and ethical impact of EV ownership, the primary benefit is that LFP batteries do not contain materials like nickel, manganese, or cobalt.
These minerals are problematic in numerous ways. Mining them takes a heavy environmental toll, damaging local ecologies in areas that lack regulations, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myanmar. This has devastated local communities and led to the exploitation of their workers.
LFP batteries also cost significantly less. According to BloombergNEF’s analysis, LFP cells, on average, are 32 percent cheaper than NMC cells. Sunoj George, director of battery engineering and propulsion architecture at Rivian, said that his company has seen savings of 20 percent to 30 percent with LFP. In September, LFP batteries fell below $60 per kilowatt-hour, helping drive global battery cell prices to a record low.
LFP batteries are also more resilient, resulting in a longer lifespan. This means that vehicles with an LFP battery can handle more charge-discharge cycles before the battery begins to lose capacity, making EVs well suited for fleets and other applications requiring frequent recharges.
This resilience also helps these batteries handle extreme temperatures. “LFP offers more thermal stability than ternary [three-part] battery systems like NCM or NCA,” Rivian’s George said. So battery fires are less of a concern for LFP-powered cars.
If LFP batteries have all those advantages, why aren’t they in every single EV? Sadly, they have some significant downsides.
The biggest is energy density. An LFP battery will offer fewer kilowatt-hours of capacity for a given weight and volume. This means fewer miles of outright range on a charge. That’s offset somewhat by the faster charging mentioned above, so for frequent, short trips, this is less of an issue. But, since so many consumers still look at maximum range before any other factor, this is a potential strike against LFP-powered cars.
Another issue is poor cold-weather performance. LFP-powered EVs lose more of their maximum range when the battery is cold and can even struggle to recharge in low temperatures.
But there are ways to address this. Rivian’s George says that the company’s “thermal conditioning system” makes it so that “the customer should not see any perceivable difference” between LFP’s cold-weather performance and that of NCM or NCA batteries.
Finally, while LFP batteries cost less to manufacture, they are also worth less when recycling. “There is less inherent metal value in an LFP pack versus a nickel-based pack,” said Jackson Switzer, vice president of commercial at Redwood Materials. Less value potentially means less motivation to recycle these batteries, but the good news is that they’re just as easily recyclable.
So it’s a give-and-take, but manufacturers are increasingly deciding that the trade-offs are worthwhile, especially in their fleet applications.
Mercedes-Benz selected LFP cells for its new eSprinter van. “Cell degradation is lower than other batteries, ensuring durability and low maintenance requirements at the very same time as well. It’s ideal for light commercial vehicles,” said Klaus Rehkugler, head of sales and marketing at Mercedes-Benz Vans.
Lisa Drake, vice president of EV programs and energy supply chain at Ford, said that as EV charging stations become more widespread, LFP cells will make more sense: “People are more willing to accept shorter trips, smaller trips, but they want to [charge] more often. And they want to fast-charge more often. And LFP battery technology allows them to do that.”
The same is true for personal-use vehicles. Mercedes-Benz unveiled its Concept CLA Class last year, a small, next-generation electric sedan to debut next year. Markus Schäfer, chief technology officer at Mercedes-Benz, said that the company will offer different battery technologies. “We need to split, so that’s an entry version with an LFP battery with a smaller range. In terms of kilometers, it could be 500 kilometers [311 miles] on this CLA Class car,” he said. “But on the upper end, you could opt for more horsepower, for more range.” The performance-oriented version, then, would rely on non-LFP design.
Going forward, LFP is projected to continue to gain momentum. An April report from BloombergNEF points to a continual increase in LFP production in China by major suppliers like CATL, along with expanding output from manufacturers elsewhere in the world, like LG Energy Solution in South Korea.
Given LFP batteries’ durability and cost advantages, Ford’s Drake believes that lining up an LFP supply will be vital for manufacturers: “If you don’t have LFP in your fleet, I don’t know how you will really scale.”
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is no fan of renewable energy. He has said solar power is too expensive to work at scale, threatened to impose steep taxes on solar panels arriving from abroad, and advanced seemingly unfounded claims that many rabbits “get caught in” solar installations and die. On wind energy, Trump is even more voluble: He has made sweeping claims that wind turbines kill whales and “thousands” of bald eagles, that they break down in saltwater, and that they “ruin the atmosphere.” It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s Republican Party is expected to repeal many of President Biden’s landmark measures promoting renewable energy.
That puts the Biden administration’s delegation at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in an awkward position. At COP29, as this year’s conference is known, governments are expected to tout major new policies to fight climate change. But anything the outgoing administration announces now could be dead on arrival when Trump is inaugurated in January.
Nevertheless, the Biden team appears to be hoping that a push for one of the world’s most controversial forms of zero-emissions power will be more palatable to the president’s successor. On the conference’s third day on Wednesday, the administration announced that it would set a goal to triple U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050. That would involve adding around 200 gigawatts of new nuclear generation by supporting both the kinds of large reactors familiar to many Americans as well as new “small modular” facilities that are easier to construct and permit. The administration pledged to work with nuclear developers and power utilities to find the cheapest and easiest places to build big plants — and to push out almost $1 billion in support for small modular reactors.
“Over the last four years the United States has really established the industrial capacity and the muscle memory across the economy to carry out this plan,” said Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate advisor, in an interview with Bloomberg at COP29.
Biden officials are well aware that Trump and the Republican Party have frequently embraced nuclear energy as a reliable and clean solution for the country’s growing electricity needs. The party’s platform this year stated that “Republicans will unleash Energy Production from all sources, including nuclear.” Earlier this year, a Pew Research poll found that around two-thirds of Republican voters support expanding nuclear power, a higher rate than for Democrats. As John Podesta, Biden’s senior climate advisor, said during a press conference at COP29, “The desire to build out next-generation nuclear is still there.”
However, the Republican Party — and even the president-elect himself — is hardly of one mind when it comes to nuclear power. During his three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump said that nuclear power is “very clean” but also noted that the reactors “get too big and too complex and too expensive,” citing significant cost overruns and delays at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle, where new nuclear reactors opened this year.
Still, Malwina Qvist, the director of the nuclear energy program at the research and advocacy nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said nuclear power has the potential to be a rare area of consensus between Biden and Trump when it comes to climate change and energy, especially given recent pushes to revive nuclear power in localities across the country. California lawmakers passed a bill earlier this year that will enable the state’s Diablo Canyon power plant to stay open through 2030, juiced by a $1.1 billion investment from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, in September Microsoft announced that it would buy power from a reopened nuclear plant at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of an infamous reactor meltdown in 1979.
“We’ve seen bipartisan support for nuclear energy over the years and growing appetite for developing new and preserving existing nuclear energy from governors in red and blue states alike,” she said. Qvist added that her organization aims to “preserve the gains made during this administration, and to advance them during the next.”
But fears that reactor meltdowns will lead to disastrous releases of radiation, as well as the fact that nuclear waste remains radioactive for millenia and must be stored in secure locations, can make nuclear energy a hard sell. A number of environmental organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, oppose a nuclear revival for these reasons. Even so, over the course of its history there have been far fewer deaths attributed to nuclear per unit of energy created than to the fossil-fuel-powered plants it can replace.
Either way, the Biden administration’s last-minute nuclear agenda is unlikely to be enough to triple power generation on its own. Much recent investment in the U.S. nuclear space has gone toward keeping alive or reopening the plants that already exist across the country, but building a fleet of large new reactors would require billions of dollars more in new capital — more even than the massive Inflation Reduction Act, the largest clean energy investment in U.S. history, provides through its tax subsidy provisions.
“To fulfill this demand will necessitate a step-change in financing,” said Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a global nuclear advocacy organization, on the eve of COP29. “Financing nuclear power plants, particularly the upfront costs, requires government participation.”
The Biden administration can lay the groundwork for nuclear growth, but it will be up to Trump and his new Republican Congress to decide whether they want to provide that participation.
Less than a hundred miles from where world leaders are discussing how to meet their climate pledges, BP is drilling for gas.
The Shafag-Asiman project, a sprawling gas field off the Azerbaijani coast, could inject more than 1 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere, striking a major blow to efforts to slow global warming.
BP has said it intends to invest heavily in new oil and gas fields in the coming years. But it would be unable to pursue these dirty projects without billions in support from big banks. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, along with a number of other banks, all helped BP raise more than $5 billion last year.
Banks will be in focus at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, as world leaders discuss how to raise hundreds of billions of dollars for countries suffering the effects of climate change.
Although talks are unlikely to address their continued support for dirty energy, more than 140 banks worldwide have pledged to cut emissions associated with their lending and investments to almost zero by 2050.
In May 2021, the International Energy Agency, the global body coordinating countries’ energy policies, sounded the alarm. Any new oil and gas developments would make it inevitable that temperatures would rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. In other words, they would devastate the planet.
Meanwhile, at BP’s Shafag-Asiman field, engineers were celebrating after finding fossil gas several thousand meters under the seabed. And the bankers were preparing to raise billions more for BP.
That’s not all. Since May 2021, global banks that have committed to net-zero have poured almost $1 trillion into companies pursuing expansion of oil and gas projects that would push the world beyond its survivable limits. Taken together, these projects would produce almost seven times the annual emissions of the U.S., according to an analysis by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, or TBIJ.
“It’s indefensible,” said John Lang, founder of the Net Zero Tracker that evaluates big companies’ net-zero plans. “There’s no way we can meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement if we continue financing the exploration of oil and gas.”
He said banks with net-zero commitments covering direct and indirect emissions could not fund oil and gas expansion. “It’s greenwashing, plain and simple.”
It was at COP26 three years ago that a number of major banks first pledged that by 2050, they would cut almost all the emissions from their lending and investments to zero and invest in financial products to offset the remaining emissions — which has come to be known as “net-zero.” Citigroup, for instance, said it would do this in part by helping its clients transition away from fossil fuels and by stopping funding companies that do not.
Many of the banks trumpet their net-zero credentials in public. But Nigel Topping, a member of the U.K.’s Climate Change Committee, explained that even when banks commit to cutting emissions associated with their financing in line with net-zero, “it doesn’t stop them from financing companies that are continuing to expand [oil and gas production].”
Citi’s chief executive, Jane Fraser, has said: “As the world’s most global bank, we can help drive the transition to a net-zero economy and make good on the promise of the Paris Agreement.” The bank says it has already beaten its 2030 target and cut CO2 emissions associated with energy clients by 38 percent between 2020 and 2022. But the funds it continues to raise for fossil fuel expanders threatens to lock in oil and gas production — and their emissions — well beyond 2030.
Take its support for BP, which announced record profits in February last year and promptly announced it would scale back its climate commitments and increase investments in oil and gas. It then enlisted the help of Citi and a host of other “net-zero” banks to raise $5.3 billion — and went on to invest $4.8 billion in its oil and gas operations in the first half of this year.
BP also announced the first oil to be extracted from a new platform in Azerbaijan’s sector of the Caspian basin, which is expected to be operating until at least 2049, just a year before the world is supposed to have cut its dependence on fossil fuels.
BP and Citigroup did not respond to a request for comment. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo declined to comment.
More than 180 companies expanding fossil fuel production have raised money from banks that have committed to net-zero since May 2021, according to an analysis of data from the environmental campaign group Rainforest Action Network. Their expansion projects are spread across the globe, from ConocoPhillips in the Arctic Circle to Petrobras near the mouth of the Amazon River and Shell in the U.K.’s North Sea.
A TBIJ analysis of the Global Oil and Gas Exit List, compiled by environmental campaign group Urgewald, shows these expansionary projects could produce almost 90 billion barrels of oil equivalent, which scientists say should stay in the ground. Around half of that is oil and half is gas, according to Urgewald, and calculations suggest it could generate more than 34 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions when burned.
Topping said: “The fundamental problem is that the transition is not driven by regulation. … The only people who can make companies change are regulators, and the regulators are letting us down.”
