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      Electricity From Coal Is Pricey. Should Consumers Have to Pay?

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      Environmental groups are making a new economic argument against coal, the heaviest polluting fossil fuel. Some regulators are listening.For decades, environmentalists fought power plants that burn coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, by highlighting their pollution: soot, mercury and the carbon dioxide that is dangerously heating the planet.But increasingly, opponents have been making an economic argument, telling regulators that electricity produced by coal is more expensive for consumers than power generated by solar, wind and other renewable sources.And that’s been a winning strategy recently in two states where regulators forbade utilities from recouping their losses from coal-fired plants by passing those costs to ratepayers. The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, two leading environmental groups, are hoping that if utilities are forced to absorb all the costs of burning coal, it could speed the closures of uneconomical plants.The groups are focused on utilities that generate electricity from coal and also distribute it. Those utilities have historically been allowed to pass their operating losses to customers, leaving them with costly electric bills while the plants emitted carbon dioxide that could have been avoided with a different fuel source, according to the environmental groups.About 75 percent of the nation’s roughly 200 coal-fired power plants are owned by utilities that control both generation and distribution.In 2023, utilities across the United States incurred about $3 billion in losses by running coal-fired power plants when it was cheaper to buy power from lower-cost, less polluting sources, according to RMI, a nonprofit research organization focused on clean energy. About 96 percent of those losses were incurred by plants that controlled both power generation and distribution, the organization said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gov. Jim Justice Faces Heavy Business Debts as He Seeks Senate Seat

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      The Justice companies have long had a reputation for not paying their debts. But that may be catching up to them.Jim Justice, the businessman-turned-politician governor of West Virginia, has been pursued in court for years by banks, governments, business partners and former employees for millions of dollars in unmet obligations.And for a long time, Mr. Justice and his family’s companies have managed to stave off one threat after another with wily legal tactics notably at odds with the aw-shucks persona that has endeared him to so many West Virginians. On Tuesday, he is heavily favored to win the Republican Senate primary and cruise to victory in the general election, especially after the departure of the Democratic incumbent, Joe Manchin III.But now, as he wraps up his second term as governor and campaigns for a seat in the U.S. Senate, things are looking dicier. Much like Donald J. Trump, with whom he is often compared — with whom he often compares himself — Mr. Justice has faced a barrage of costly judgments and legal setbacks.And this time, there may be too many, some suspect, for Mr. Justice, 73, and his family to fend them all off. “It’s a simple matter of math,” said Steven New, a lawyer in Mr. Justice’s childhood hometown, Beckley, W.Va., who, like many lawyers in coal country, has tangled with Justice companies. Mr. Justice and his scores of businesses would be able to handle some of these potential multimillion-dollar judgments in isolation, Mr. New said. But “when you add it all up, and put the judgments together close in time, it would appear he doesn’t have enough,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Last Coal-Fired Power Plants in New England Are to Close

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      The company that owns the Merrimack and Schiller stations in New Hampshire plans to turn them into solar farms and battery storage for offshore wind.The last two coal-fired power plants in New England are set to close by 2025 and 2028, ending the use of a fossil fuel that supplied electricity to the region for more than 50 years.The decision to close the Merrimack and Schiller stations, both in New Hampshire, makes New England the second region in the country, after the Pacific Northwest, to stop burning coal.Environmentalists waged a five-year legal battle against the New Hampshire plants, saying that the owner had discharged warm water from steam turbines into a nearby river without cooling it first to match the natural temperature.In a settlement reached on Wednesday with the Sierra Club and the Conservative Law Foundation, Granite Shore Power, the owner of the plants, agreed that Schiller would not run after Dec. 31, 2025 and that Merrimack would cease operations no later than June 2028.“This announcement is the culmination of years of persistence and dedication from so many people across New England,” said Gina McCarthy, a former national climate adviser to President Biden and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration who is now a senior adviser at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which supports efforts to phase out coal.“I’m wicked proud to live in New England today and be here,” Ms. McCarthy said. “Every day, we’re showing the rest of the country that we will secure our clean energy future without compromising.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Energy Transition Is Underway. Fossil Fuel Workers Could Be Left Behind.

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      The Biden administration is trying to increase renewable energy investments in distressed regions, but some are skeptical those measures would be enough to make up for job losses.Tiffany Berger spent more than a decade working at a coal-fired power plant in Coshocton County, Ohio, eventually becoming a unit operator making about $100,000 annually.But in 2020, American Electric Power shut down the plant, and Ms. Berger struggled to find a job nearby that offered a comparable salary. She sold her house, moved in with her parents and decided to help run their farm in Newcomerstown, Ohio, about 30 minutes away.They sell some of the corn, beans and beef they harvest, but it is only enough to keep the farm running. Ms. Berger, 39, started working part time at a local fertilizer and seed company last year, making just a third of what she used to earn. She said she had “never dreamed” the plant would close.“I thought I was set to retire from there,” Ms. Berger said. “It’s a power plant. I mean, everybody needs power.”The United States is undergoing a rapid shift away from fossil fuels as new battery factories, wind and solar projects, and other clean energy investments crop up across the country. An expansive climate law that Democrats passed last year could be even more effective than Biden administration officials had estimated at reducing fossil fuel emissions. While the transition is projected to create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs, it could be devastating for many workers and counties that have relied on coal, oil and gas for their economic stability. Estimates of the potential job losses in the coming years vary, but roughly 900,000 workers were directly employed by fossil fuel industries in 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.The Biden administration is trying to mitigate the impact, mostly by providing additional tax advantages for renewable energy projects that are built in areas vulnerable to the energy transition. But some economists, climate researchers and union leaders said they are skeptical the initiatives will be enough. Beyond construction, wind and solar farms typically require few workers to operate, and new clean energy jobs might not necessarily offer comparable wages or align with the skills of laid-off workers.Coal plants have already been shutting down for years, and the nation’s coal production has fallen from its peak in the late 2000s. U.S. coal-fired generation capacity is projected to decline sharply to about 50 percent of current levels by 2030, according to the Energy Information Administration. About 41,000 workers remain in the coal mining industry, down from about 177,000 in the mid-1980s.The industry’s demise is a problem not just for its workers but also for the communities that have long relied on coal to power their tax revenue. The loss of revenue from mines, plants and workers can mean less money for schools, roads and law enforcement. A recent paper from the Aspen Institute found that from 1980 to 2019, regions exposed to the decline of coal saw long-run reductions in earnings and employment rates, greater uptake of Medicare and Medicaid benefits and substantial decreases in population, particularly among younger workers. That “leaves behind a population that is disproportionately old, sick and poor,” according to the paper.The Biden administration has promised to help those communities weather the impact, for both economic and political reasons. Failure to adequately help displaced workers could translate into the kind of populist backlash that hurt Democrats in the wake of globalization as companies shifted factories to China. Promises to restore coal jobs also helped Donald J. Trump clinch the 2016 election, securing him crucial votes in states like Pennsylvania.Federal officials have vowed to create jobs in hard-hit communities and ensure that displaced workers “benefit from the new clean energy economy” by offering developers billions in bonus tax credits to put renewable energy projects in regions dependent on fossil fuels.Tiffany Berger, who was laid off when the plant in Coshocton County was shut down, struggled to find work that offered a comparable salary. She moved in with her parents and decided to help run her family’s farm.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIf new investments like solar farms or battery storage facilities are built in those regions, called “energy communities,” developers could get as much as 40 percent of a project’s cost covered. Businesses receiving credits for producing electricity from renewable sources could earn a 10 percent boost.The Inflation Reduction Act also set aside at least $4 billion in tax credits that could be used to build clean energy manufacturing facilities, among other projects, in regions with closed coal mines or plants, and it created a program that could guarantee up to $250 billion in loans to repurpose facilities like a shuttered power plant for clean energy uses.Brian Anderson, the executive director of the Biden administration’s interagency working group on energy communities, pointed to other federal initiatives, including increased funding for projects to reclaim abandoned mine lands and relief funds to revitalize coal communities.Still, he said that the efforts would not be enough, and that officials had limited funding to directly assist more communities.“We’re standing right at the cusp of potentially still leaving them behind again,” Mr. Anderson said.Phil Smith, the chief of staff at the United Mine Workers of America, said that the tax credits for manufacturers could help create more jobs but that $4 billion likely would not be enough to attract facilities to every region. He said he also hoped for more direct assistance for laid-off workers, but Congress did not fund those initiatives. “We think that’s still something that needs to be done,” Mr. Smith said.Gordon Hanson, the author of the Aspen Institute paper and a professor of urban policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said he worried the federal government was relying too heavily on the tax credits, in part because companies would likely be more inclined to invest in growing areas. He urged federal officials to increase unemployment benefits to distressed regions and funding for work force development programs.Even with the bonus credit, clean energy investments might not reach the hardest-hit areas because a broad swath of regions meets the federal definition of an energy community, said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future.“If the intention of that provision was to specifically provide an advantage to the hardest-hit fossil fuel communities, I don’t think it’s done that,” Mr. Raimi said.Local officials have had mixed reactions to the federal efforts. Steve Henry, the judge-executive of Webster County, Ky., said he believed they could bring renewable energy investments and help attract other industries to the region. The county experienced a significant drop in tax revenue after its last mine shut down in 2019, and it now employs fewer 911 dispatchers and deputy sheriffs because officials cannot offer more competitive wages.“I think we can recover,” he said. “But it’s going to be a long recovery.”Adam O’Nan, the judge-executive of Union County, Ky., which has one coal mine left, said he thought renewable energy would bring few jobs to the area, and he doubted that a manufacturing plant would be built because of the county’s inadequate infrastructure.“It’s kind of difficult to see how it reaches down into Union County at this point,” Mr. O’Nan said. “We’re best suited for coal at the moment.”Federal and state efforts so far have done little to help workers like James Ault, 42, who was employed at an oil refinery in Contra Costa County, Calif., for 14 years before he was laid off in 2020. To keep his family afloat, he depleted his pension and withdrew most of the money from his 401(k) early.In early 2022, he moved to Roseville, Calif., to work at a power plant, but he was laid off again after four months. He worked briefly as a meal delivery driver before landing a job in February at a nearby chemical manufacturer.He now makes $17 an hour less than he did at the refinery and is barely able to cover his mortgage. Still, he said he would not return to the oil industry.“With our push away from gasoline, I feel that I would be going into an industry that is kind of dying,” Mr. Ault said. More

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      White House Clarifies Biden’s Coal Remarks After Outrage From Manchin

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      PHILADELPHIA — President Biden came under fire from a crucial member of his own party, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, on Saturday after making comments that suggested coal plants in the United States would be shuttered as the nation shifts to solar and wind power.The backlash came as Mr. Biden was on a final campaign swing before Tuesday’s midterm elections, and it reflected cracks in the Democratic Party’s coalition ahead of votes that will determine which party controls Congress next year. The response also led the administration to apologize and clarify the president’s remarks, which it said were being misconstrued.“The president’s remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday.At a speech in California on Friday, Mr. Biden was discussing America’s energy transition and was lamenting the cost of using coal.“No one is building new coal plants, because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of their existence of the plant,” Mr. Biden said. “So it’s going to become a wind generation.”He added, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”In his rebuke of Mr. Biden, Mr. Manchin, a prominent centrist, criticized the president for saying that coal mines and plants should be shut down in favor of wind and solar plants. He called the comments “outrageous and divorced from reality.”“Being cavalier about the loss of coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting,” Mr. Manchin said. “The president owes these incredible workers an immediate and public apology, and it is time he learn a lesson that his words matter and have consequences.”Republicans also seized on Mr. Biden’s comments, criticizing him for pursuing an energy policy that could cost American jobs.“We know how this ends,” Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, said on Twitter. “People lose their livelihoods. You pay more for energy.”The controversy over Mr. Biden’s remarks came as he was preparing to join former President Barack Obama for a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon.Ms. Jean-Pierre said that Mr. Biden and Mr. Manchin had worked closely on legislation in the past year and that the president was an advocate for West Virginia. Noting that oil and natural gas production had increased under Mr. Biden’s watch, she said that the president was laying out the course of America’s energy transition.“No one will be left behind,” she said. More

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      How Can We Still Be Talking About Trump?

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      Gail Collins: Happy Independence Day, Bret! Want to celebrate by talking about the Supreme Court?Bret Stephens: I was sorta thinking of a cookout on the patio with a nice bottle of rosé, but fire away.Gail: We were in such accord, gnashing our teeth over the decisions on abortion and guns. How about their deep-sixing environmental regulation? You still gnashing with me?Bret: You are referring to the ruling that says the Environmental Protection Agency can’t unilaterally reinvent the entire energy economy with an expansive interpretation of the Clean Air Act that Congress did not intend when it wrote the bill? I’d say the decision was the best thing the court did this term.Guessing you … don’t see it quite the same way.Gail: Well, um … no.Congress gave the E.P.A. extensive power when it comes to regulating carbon emissions. That’s because carbon emissions are a threat to the environment and a trigger for global warming.If Congress feels the E.P.A. is going too far, it has the power to override said regulations at any time. That hasn’t happened because — gee, I guess the Congressional majority feels global warming is a big deal.Bret: The case hinges on an interpretation of the word “system.” The Clean Air Act requires power plants to adopt “the best system of emission reductions.” The court’s conservatives took “system” to mean emission-controlling technologies at the plants themselves, not a vast regulatory mechanism that puts the entire American coal industry on a swift path to extinction.Gail: I think I told you that my father worked for a utility company, and I remember the agony he went through trying to deal with both the government regulators and the folks we called “the coal barons” in West Virginia. I have sympathy for the folks in the middle here, but not so much for the barons.Bret: I grew up listening to my father’s complaints about the way the Mexican government did business with the private sector. In case you ever wonder about my worship of the works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and Ronald Coase.Gail: We obviously need to keep directing help to the working people in the mining industry, but the government’s top job is to protect the nation and future generations from global warming.Bret: If Congressional Democrats — whose majority happens to hinge on a certain senator from West Virginia — want to make a case that global warming is the country’s No. 1 priority, they should do so openly rather than sneak regulatory actions that they can’t get through Congress through the E.P.A. bureaucracy. I hold no particular brief for the coal industry per se. But Democrats need to figure out a set of climate-change policies that don’t threaten people’s wallets, jobs or businesses. Trying to put coal out of business is just a big fat political gift to Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.Aside from the court, Gail, last week’s big news enchilada was Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Did we just have a “this changes everything” moment?Gail: Well, we certainly had some “Holy cow — did you hear what Donald Trump did?” moments. But I’ve sadly gotten used to the idea that he can do almost anything and still keep his very, very large fan club of voters.Bret: Truest words ever spoken by Trump: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”Gail: Yeah, sigh. And I just don’t think there’s an appetite for trying to prosecute a former president for stuff he did while he was still in office. Am I being too cynical?Bret: Until last week, no. But, to quote from “Only Murders in the Building,” Hutchinson’s testimony “sends the investigation in a whole new direction.”I don’t mean the stuff about Trump trying to grab the steering wheel of his limo, which Hutchinson acknowledges she heard secondhand. I mean her overhearing Trump at the Jan. 6 rally yelling that he didn’t care if people were armed because they weren’t there to hurt him. And also her report that Trump instructed Mark Meadows to get in touch with Roger Stone and Mike Flynn, who in turn were apparently in touch with some of the most violent protesters on Jan. 5. If it’s true, that just seems like a textbook case of seditious conspiracy.There’s still a big question of the overall wisdom of a prosecution, however well-justified. If, God forbid, Trump runs and wins in 2024, the first thing he’ll do is find any pretext to prosecute Joe Biden, and then it’s off to the races. If you were in Merrick Garland’s shoes, what would you do? More

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      Did Joe Manchin block climate action to benefit his financial interests?

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      Did Joe Manchin block climate action to benefit his financial interests? Recent revelations that Democratic West Virginian senator quietly made millions from his coal business could come back to haunt him as he eyes a run for re-electionNancy Hilsbos, a former coal miner living in the West Virginia county that Senator Joe Manchin calls home, barely noticed the nondescript office block she passed almost daily.The property, at the top of a rise on the road out of the small city of Fairmont, bears a large sign: “Manchin Professional Building”. Nameplates announce the offices of accountants, financial advisors and insurers. But there is no mention of the most profitable and influential company registered at the address – the Democratic senator’s own firm, Enersystems.Manchin was recently revealed to have quietly made millions of dollars from Enersystems over the past three decades as the only supplier of a low grade coal to a high-polluting power plant near Fairmont. That came as news to Hilsbos and just about everyone else in the city.“What surprised me was that we didn’t know it. One of the most shocking things was that I’ve driven by that place thousands of times in the last 30 years and I had no idea that’s where his business operation was headquartered because there’s no sign,” said Hilsbos.“I wonder why he’s not prouder of what he’s done. Why doesn’t he have a big sign that says Enersystems?”In 2020, Manchin earned nearly half a million dollars from the company, and $5.6m over the previous decade.But Hilsbos, who worked underground for 13 years and was also a union activist, is less bothered by the senator keeping the source of his wealth shielded than what else may have been hidden from view.For years, Manchin has justified voting against curbs on the burning of fossil fuels and other measures to tackle the climate crisis on the grounds that they were bad for West Virginia with its economy and culture rooted in coal mining. Last year, he used his vote in a hung US Senate to block President Biden’s $3.5tn economic plan in part because he said he was “very, very disturbed” that its climate provisions would kill the coal industry.But following the revelations that Manchin has made what most West Virginians would regard as a small fortune from the Grant Town power plant, Hilsbos was left wondering if US climate policy, and by extension the global response to the crisis, has been held hostage to the senator’s financial interests.“If he used it to slow the responsible addressing of climate change issues then that’s an international responsibility,” she said. “What’s wrong is him throwing so much weight against the public interest when he has so much to gain by the continued existence of this kind of facility.”Hilsbos is not alone in her concern.Christopher Regan, a former vice-chair of the West Virginia Democratic party who worked as an aide to Manchin, recalled a time when the senator painted prominent Republican officials in the state as “involved in self-service as opposed to public service”, a line Regan then promoted.“This thing with the coal plant turns that around on him. What’s he doing? Is this for West Virginia? Or is this just strictly for his own narrow pecuniary interest?” he said.Regan said that’s a question that could haunt Manchin as he eyes a run for re-election in two years.Manchin founded Enersystems in 1988 with his brother, Roch, at about the time the state was considering an application to build a power plant in Grant Town, a small former mining community less than 20 minutes drive north of Fairmont.Manchin, then a state senator, helped clear the way for the construction of the power plant while negotiating a deal to become the only supplier of its fuel. Not just any fuel but discarded coal known as “garbage of bituminous”, more popularly called “gob”, that is even more polluting than regular coal.When the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised concerns that the Grant Town plant was too close to other coal burning facilities, increasing pollution levels in the area, Manchin intervened and the objections went away. Later, as his state’s governor, Manchin used his political influence to win approval for an increase in the rate charged for electricity charged by the plant which increased bills for ordinary West Virginians. The New York Times reported that, in a highly unusual arrangement, the senator has been getting a cut of those bills.After his election to the US Senate in 2010, Manchin sat on the energy committee, and then became its chair, from where he has blocked environmental regulations that would have hit the Grant Town plant and other gob burning facilities. Manchin also stood in the way of Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan which potentially threatened the power plant with tighter federal climate regulations. The senator defended the move as necessary in the midst of the Covid crisis, economic uncertainty and with fuel supplies threatened by Russia’s war on Ukraine.But the suspicion remains that he was, at least in part, acting in his own interests. Hilsbos said that the first she knew about the source of Manchin’s wealth came from recent revelations in The Intercept and later the New York Times. They prompted demonstrations outside the power plant in April to demand its closure because of the additional pollution caused by gob.Although Hilsbos said she sympathised with the protesters concerns, she also understood the fears of people in Grant Town, once home to the largest underground mine in the world by the amount of coal produced. The mine closed in the mid-80s, shedding hundreds of jobs. Now the power plant, with about 50 workers, is the only major private employer in a town without a gas station or convenience store.“Some neighbours came forward and said, I’ve always hated that place. But when we went to the town council meeting and tried to explain to them why people were coming from everywhere to demonstrate here, they said, ‘We don’t want you here, don’t come’,” said Hilsbos.“A lot of the people involved in the town council have worked in the mines themselves. They feel like this is what we can do to hold on to our homeland, not have to move away, have this little plant as long as we can.”While few in neighbouring Fairmont knew where Enersystems was, Manchin also maintained a highly visible campaign office opposite the county courthouse in the heart of the city, between Bill’s Bail Bonds and a yoga studio. From there, he built a strong loyalty among West Virginia voters as a conservative Democrat prepared to stand up to the liberal wing of his party and to defend coal.Regan said the senator spent years cultivating an image of himself as his own man, above party politics.“He’s done a good job of it. He had his famous rifle ad, shooting the climate bill during the Obama administration, that he used to gain distance from the Democratic party on the national scale. But the effectiveness of that strategy may be running out. The magnitude of the shift within the state is too large for it to work anymore,” he said.In 2010, Democrats had a firm grip on the West Virginian legislature. Today, the Republicans are in control and they hold the governor’s office.All of West Virginia’s congressional seats have fallen to the Republicans, leaving Manchin as the last Democrat holding statewide office. Manchin won his Senate seat in 2012 with nearly 61% of the vote, beating the Republican candidate by more than 24 points. Six years later, his margin of victory was just three points and he took less than half the vote after openly criticising Donald Trump in a state where the then president was hugely popular and remains so.For all that, Greg Thomas, a prominent West Virginia Republican operative and Manchin opponent, does not think the coal plant revelations will damage the senator with most voters.“If you’re a West Virginia politician and you’re not under some sort of investigation, you’re not trying hard enough to help your people,” he said.“No one here cares about environmentalists protesting Joe Manchin’s personal financial holding. It’s gotten to the point where it’s like, who cares if he does? We assume they’re all corrupt.”Thomas said that Manchin’s political stands against his fellow Democrats have reinvigorated support.“His popularity in West Virginia is coming back after it dropped over his fights with Trump. Pushing back against Biden has helped. His position on energy issues has been big, he said.Manchin’s approval rating among West Virginia voters has surged to 57% from just 40% early last year – and is even higher among Republicans.Regan disagreed, saying that suspicions about his actions over the power plant are “threatening” to the senator because they come on the back of disenchantment among the state’s dwindling band of Democratic voters over his failure to support Biden’s agenda. Manchin’s vote against enshrining abortion rights into federal law as the supreme court appears poised to strike down Roe v Wade will further alienate some Democratic voters in the state.Regan said the last election left Manchin with a margin of victory of fewer than 20,000 votes – a narrow cushion to soak up the loss of angry Democrats who will not turn out to vote for him. He said the Grant Town power plant revelations are likely to stoke the dissatisfaction within that part of the electorate.“Those Democrats he has alienated by being against Build Back Better and the child tax credit, and those very, very popular provisions among Democrats, may cost him in terms of people who don’t vote or people who just simply won’t vote for him anymore. That may cost him the margin he has left and leave him in a bad situation in 2024.”Then there is Trump. West Virginia voted for him in both presidential elections by the largest margin of any state except Wyoming.“I think anybody in 2024 who is not prepared to say that Trump won the election – is not going to be an acceptable candidate anymore,” he said. “He can’t walk into the Republican camp, and he’ll have alienated too many Democrats to win.”TopicsJoe ManchinWest VirginiaUS politicsCoalFossil fuelsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Australia’s ‘Climate Election’ Finally Arrived. Will It Be Enough?

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      Voters rejected the deny-and-delay approach that has made Australia a global laggard on emission cuts. But how far the new government will go remains to be seen.SYDNEY, Australia — A few minutes after taking the stage to declare victory in Australia’s election on Saturday, Anthony Albanese, the incoming Labor prime minister, promised to transform climate change from a source of political conflict into a generator of economic growth.“Together we can end the climate wars,” he told his supporters, who cheered for several seconds. “Together we can take advantage of the opportunity for Australia to be a renewable energy superpower.”With that comment and his win — along with a surge of votes for candidates outside the two-party system who made combating global warming a priority — the likelihood of a significant shift in Australia’s climate policy has suddenly increased.How far the country goes will depend on the final tallies, which are still being counted. But for voters, activists and scientists who spent years in despair, lamenting the fossil fuel industry’s hold on the conservatives who have run Australia for most of the past three decades, Saturday’s results amount to an extraordinary reversal.A country known as a global climate laggard, with minimal 2030 targets for cuts to carbon emissions, has finally tossed aside a deny-and-delay approach to climate change that most Australians, in polls, have said they no longer want.“This is the long-overdue climate election Australia has been waiting for,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University. “It was a defining moment in our nation’s history.”Yet it remains to be seen whether the factors that led to that shift can be as powerful and persuasive as the countervailing forces which are so entrenched.The Abbot Point coal terminal in Queensland. Australia spends billions each year on subsidies for fossil fuel industries.David Maurice Smith for The New York TimesIn Australia, as in the United States, ending or altering many decades’ worth of traditional energy habits will be difficult.In the last fiscal year alone, Australian federal, state and territory governments provided about 11.6 billion Australian dollars ($8.2 billion) worth of subsidies to coal and other fossil fuel industries.An additional 55.3 billion Australian dollars ($39 billion) has already been committed to subsidizing gas and oil extraction, coal-fired power, coal railways, ports and carbon capture and storage (even though most carbon capture projects fail).As Dr. Gergis pointed out in a recent essay, “That is 10 times more than the Emergency Response Fund, and over 50 times the budget of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency.”In other words, Australia still spends far more money to bolster the companies causing the planet to warm than it does helping people deal with the costs tied to the greenhouse gases they emit.Over the past few years, there has been a buildup in renewable energy investment, too, but nothing on the same scale. And during the campaign, Mr. Albanese’s Labor party tried to avoid directly tackling that mismatch.On Election Day in Singleton, a bustling town in northwest New South Wales, where over 20 percent of residents work in mining, Labor banners reading “Send a miner to Canberra” hung next to signs from the National Party, part of the departing conservative coalition, that read “Protect local mining jobs.” And both parties’ candidates were upbeat about the region’s mining future.Labor supporters in Sydney on Saturday. Mr. Albanese will face pressure to do more to cut emissions.Lukas Coch/EPA, via Shutterstock“While people are buying our coal we’ll definitely be selling it,” said Dan Repacholi, a former miner who won the seat for Labor.The coal mining industry is thriving in the area, but so is private investment in renewables, especially hydrogen. “We’re going to have a massive boom here through both of those industries going up and up and up,” Mr. Repacholi said.During the campaign, Mr. Albanese positioned himself as a “both-and” candidate, pledging support for new coal mines as well as renewables — in large part, to hold on to blue-collar areas like Singleton.But now he will face a lot of pressure to go further on climate, faster.The great swing against the conservative coalition on Saturday included a groundswell for the Australian Greens, who could end up being needed by Labor to form a minority government.Adam Bandt, the Greens’ leader, has said that a ban on new coal and gas projects would be the party’s top priority in any power-sharing agreement.Several new independent lawmakers, who campaigned on demands for Australia to increase its 2030 target for carbon emission cuts to 60 percent below 2005 levels — far beyond Labor’s 43 percent commitment — will also be pressuring Mr. Albanese and his opposition.“Both sides of politics are going to have to reorient themselves,” said Saul Griffith, an energy policy expert who advocates policies that would make it easier for people to power their cars and heat their homes with electricity. “This is a very clear message on climate.”More than one in four homes in Australia now have solar panels, more than in any other major economy.Faye Sakura for The New York TimesLike many other experts, Mr. Griffith said he was not particularly interested in bold official promises to end coal mining, which he expects to fade on its own through economic pressure.New gas projects present a bigger problem. An immense extraction effort being planned for the gas fields of the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory could produce enough carbon emissions to destroy any hope of Australia’s meeting reduction targets on par with those of other developed nations.Climate action advocates are mostly hoping to start with legislation like the bill introduced by Zali Steggall, an independent, which would set up a framework for setting stricter emissions targets and working toward them through rigorous science and research.Robyn Eckersley, an expert on the politics of climate change at the University of Melbourne, warned that Labor, the Greens and independents needed to “play a long game,” keeping in mind that a carbon tax caused a backlash that set Australian climate policy back by nearly a decade.Fixating on a single number or a single idea, she said, would impede progress and momentum.“It’s important to get something in and build a consensus around it,” Professor Eckersley said. “Having debates about how to improve it is better than swinging back and forth between something and nothing.”Mr. Griffith said Australia had a shot at becoming a global model for the energy transition that climate change requires by leveraging its record-breaking uptake of rooftop solar. More than one in four homes in Australia now have solar panels, outpacing every other major economy; they provide electricity for about one-fifth of what it costs through the traditional grid.New South Wales in February 2020. Australia has yet to recover fully from that year’s record-breaking bush fires.Matthew Abbott for The New York Times“The real action on climate has got to be community-led,” Mr. Griffith said. He argued that the election results were encouraging because they showed the issue resonating with a wider range of the electorate.“It’s a less divisive set of politics, it’s coming from the center,” he said. “It’s a middle-class uprising, and so the climate action isn’t as partisan.”Sadly, it’s taken a lot of suffering to get there. Australia has yet to recover fully from the record-breaking bush fires of 2020, which were followed by two years of widespread flooding.The Great Barrier Reef also just experienced its sixth year of bleaching — disturbingly, the first during a La Niña climate pattern, when cooler temperatures typically prevent overheating.“People no longer need to use their imaginations to try and understand what climate change looks like in this country,” Dr. Gergis said. “Australians have been living the consequences of inaction.”Yan Zhuang More