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    Trump signs orders to allow coal-fired power plants to remain open

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    Donald Trump signed four executive orders on Tuesday aimed at reviving coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel that has long been in decline, and which substantially contributes to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.Environmentalists expressed dismay at the news, saying that Trump was stuck in the past and wanted to make utility customers “pay more for yesterday’s energy”.The US president is using emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants scheduled for retirement to keep producing electricity.The move, announced at a White House event on Tuesday afternoon, was described by White House officials as being in response to increased US power demand from growth in datacenters, artificial intelligence and electric cars.Trump, standing in front of a group of miners in hard hats, said he would sign an executive order “that slashes unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal”.He added that “we will rapidly expedite leases for coal mining on federal lands”, “streamline permitting”, “end the government bias against coal” and use the Defense Production Act “to turbocharge coal mining in America”.The first order directed all departments and agencies to “end all discriminatory policies against the coal industry” including by ending the leasing moratorium on coal on federal land and accelerate all permitted funding for coal projects.The second imposes a moratorium on the “unscientific and unrealistic policies enacted by the Biden administration” to protect coal power plants currently operating.The third promotes “grid security and reliability” by ensuring that grid policies are focused on “secure and effective energy production” as opposed to “woke” policies that “discriminate against secure sources of power like coal and other fossil fuels”.The fourth instructs the justice department to “vigorously pursue and investigate” the “unconstitutional” policies of “radically leftist states” that “discriminate against coal”.Trump’s approach is in contrast to that of his predecessor Joe Biden, who in May last year brought in new climate rules requiring huge cuts in carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants that some experts said were “probably terminal” for an industry that until recently provided most of the US’s power, but is being driven out of the sector by cheaper renewables and gas.Trump, a Republican, has long promised to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal to fire power plants and for other uses, but the industry has been in decline for decades.The EPA under Trump last month announced a barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits, including seeking to overturn the Biden-era plan to reduce the number of coal plants.The orders direct the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, to “acknowledge the end” of an Obama-era moratorium that paused coal leasing on federal lands and to require federal agencies to rescind policies transitioning the nation away from coal production.The orders also seek to promote coal and coal technology exports and to accelerate development of coal technologies.Trump has long suggested that coal can help meet surging electricity demand from manufacturing and the massive datacenters needed for artificial intelligence.“Nothing can destroy coal. Not the weather, not a bomb – nothing,” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by video link in January. “And we have more coal than anybody.”Energy experts say any bump for coal under Trump is likely to be temporary because natural gas is cheaper and there is a durable market for renewable energy such as wind and solar power no matter who holds the White House.Environmental groups were scathing about the orders, pointing out that coal is in steep decline in the US compared with the increasingly cheap option of renewable energy. This year, 93% of the power added to the US grid will be from solar, wind and batteries, according to forecasts from Trump’s own administration.“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?” said Kit Kennedy, managing director of power at the Natural Resources Defense Council.“Coal plants are old and dirty, uncompetitive and unreliable. The Trump administration is stuck in the past, trying to make utility customers pay more for yesterday’s energy. Instead, it should be doing all it can to build the electricity grid of the future.”Clean energy, such as solar and wind, is now so affordable that 99% of the existing US coal fleet costs more just to keep running than to retire a coal plant and replace it with renewables, a 2023 Energy Innovation report found. More

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      They’re in Hot Water in Idaho. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.

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      50 States, 50 FixesThey’re in Hot Water in Idaho. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.Nearly 500 buildings in the state capital get their heat from a clean, renewable source located deep in the ground.Kirkham Hot Springs in Boise National Forest.It’s pretty easy to get into hot water in Boise. After all, it’s in Idaho, a state filled with hundreds of hot springs.The city has tapped into that naturally hot water to create the largest municipally run geothermal system in the country.Nearly 500 Boise businesses, government buildings and homes — as well as hospital and university buildings, City Hall and a Y.M.C.A. — are warmed by heat drawn directly from hot water reservoirs, or aquifers, below ground. The Idaho Statehouse, in Boise, is the only one in the United States to use geothermal heat. The heat even warms some sidewalks in the winter, to melt the snow, and raises the temperature in hot tubs.50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.Renewable, reliable and relatively free of pollution, geothermal heating is possible in Boise because of fault lines that expose groundwater to hot rocks, heating water to around 170 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 77 degrees Celsius. The water is drawn from wells in nearby foothills into a closed-loop network of pipes that reach into buildings, before going back to the aquifer to be heated again.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live

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      in US Politics

      What’s at stake in the US election? The climate for the next million years | Bill McKibben

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      View image in fullscreenHere is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100% of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked – they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire – and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:
      “You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said – it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming … These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”
      I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.View image in fullscreenBut it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas and coal while sidetracking sun and wind. These include ending the effort to spur EV production in Detroit; ending support for renewables (Trump has promised to “kill wind”, whatever that means); and reversing a crucial 2009 finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much of the federal effort to rein in climate pollution. He has also – chef’s kiss – promised to close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as the people who measure how much the temperature is rising. That’s on the grounds that those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.‘Drill, baby, drill’In return for this endless largesse (beginning on day one, Trump said, he would become a dictator in order to “drill, baby, drill”), he has asked the industry for only (Austin Powers moment here) “one billion dollars” in campaign contributions. Big oil is doing its best. As the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm, one of the country’s most prominent frackers, is working the phones to come up with as much cash as possible. Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector”, said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”Can Trump reverse the tide towards renewable energy? No, not entirely – it’s too strong, based on the ever-falling cost of sun, wind and batteries. Even in Texas, HQ of the hydrocarbon cartel where the state legislature has tried to pass laws limiting renewables, the undeniable economics of clean power continue to surge. The Lone Star state is now leading the nation in installing batteries on its grid, a good thing given the ongoing spate of climate disasters that strain and stress the state’s system.But he can slow it down considerably. America’s buildout of renewables is dependent, among other things, on overcoming the bewildering array of permitting requirements that make every transmission line a harrowing bureaucratic battle. At the moment, the Biden-Harris White House has a dedicated team at work, with senior officials assigned to senior projects, constantly bird-dogging them to make sure that they get built on schedule. That would disappear, replaced with a new set of bureaucrats deeply invested in making sure these projects didn’t happen.At least as bad would be the effect around the world. Last time, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, badly denting the momentum those talks had produced. This time he’d do the same and more – he’s promised, for instance, to end Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export terminals. These are designed to take huge volumes of US gas and ship it to Asia, where it will undercut the move to renewables. It is the last real growth strategy the oil industry has, and it is the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on the planet.View image in fullscreenIn essence, Trump would give every other oligarch in the world – Vladimir Putin, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on down the list – license to keep pumping away. If the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is not going to play a role, why should anyone else feel any pressure? As Project 2025 quite clearly declares, Trump would “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world”. (Though Trump has claimed not to know anything about Project 2025.) The global climate talks in Brazil next year and the 2026 version in Australia – currently shaping up to be the last huge chance for global cooperation – would be turned on their heads.There are ways to calculate the meaning of all this. The UK-based NGO Carbon Brief, for instance, said earlier this year that “a victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans”. Just for perspective, that’s a lot: “This extra 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, based on the latest US government valuations. For context, 4GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.” It’s like finding an extra continent full of greenhouse gases.But worse than the totals is the timing. If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But in fact it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration. We’re on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system – we can see it cracking in the poles (the Thwaites glacier now undermined by warm seawater), in the Atlantic (the great currents now starting to slow) and in the Amazon (where savannafication seems to be gathering speed). The earth’s hydrological system – how water moves around the earth – has already gone kaflooey, as warm air holds far more water vapor than cold.The world’s climate scientists have done their best to set out a timetable: cut emissions in half by 2030 or see the possibilities of anything like the Paris pathway, holding temperature increases to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, disappear. That cut is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, but only if everyone is acting in good faith. And the next presidential term will end in January of 2029, which is 11 months before 2030.If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts. More

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      Biden administration to award $7bn in grants to create US ‘hydrogen hubs’

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      The Department of Energy has selected seven projects for a $7bn program to launch the development and production of hydrogen fuel, the White House announced on Friday.The Biden administration says the program will constitute a major boost to the country’s nascent clean hydrogen industry, helping it achieve its climate goals. But many climate advocates are skeptical that it will actually help reduce emissions.Unlike coal, oil, and gas, when burned, hydrogen does not produce greenhouse gas emissions. It can be produced using carbon-free energy, but roughly 96% of it is currently derived from planet-heating fossil fuels – something the Biden administration hopes to change.“With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,” said Jennifer Granholm, secretary of energy, in a statement.The money will be awarded to proposed hydrogen projects on the Gulf Coast, the mid-Atlantic, Appalachia, the midwest, the upper midwest, the Pacific north-west and California. Dozens of regions competed for funds from the $7b pot, set aside in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. On Friday, Joe Biden will travel to Philadelphia to promote the mid-Atlantic hub.The Department of Energy says it expects the funding to help cut 25m metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, the equivalent of removing 5.5m gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year.But some experts say the new initiative could amount to little more than greenwashing. Though researchers agree that truly clean hydrogen, produced without fossil fuels, can fulfill certain crucial roles in hard-to-decarbonize sectors, including in the production of synthetic fertilizers and steel, studies have found it to be much less efficient for home heating and transportation than technologies such as heat pumps and electric vehicles.“Direct electrification and batteries offer so much more, and much more quickly,” Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, told the Guardian this year.Despite this, fossil fuel companies have spent years promotinghydrogen production as a catch-all climate solution. Some have used the hope of clean hydrogen to justify building more pipelines, claiming that they can be used to transport the climate-friendly fuel in the future.Climate advocates also note that hydrogen production, even when powered by renewable energy, can be highly water intensive. And since hydrogen is also a highly flammable and corrosive element, it can create risk for workers.Oil companies often say fossil fuels can power hydrogen production, so long any emissions produced are trapped with carbon capture and kept out of the atmosphere.But carbon capture technology is not currently available at commercial scale, and a 2021 paper co-authored by Haworth found that using methane gas paired with carbon capture to produce so-called “blue” hydrogen for home heating, could produce more climate-warming pollution burning gas, coal or diesel oil.“At face value – and according to the Biden playbook – the hydrogen hub grants aim to help transition the United States to clean energy,” said Marion Gee, co-executive director at the Climate Justice Alliance, a national coalition of grassroots environmental justice groups. “In reality, they amount to another corporate scam, one that preserves and extends the life of the extractive economy and prevents the frontline communities most impacted by climate disaster from having input.”Julie McNamara, deputy policy director of the science and climate advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, said the administration should impose stricter regulations on the hydrogen hubs to boost community input and ensure only completely fossil-free projects receive funding.“Concerningly, today’s H2Hubs announcement advances multiple projects premised on fossil fuel-based hydrogen production and risky hydrogen end uses,” she said. “Billions of taxpayer dollars are at risk of perpetuating fossil fuel industry injustices and harms while subsidizing fossil fuel greenwashing.” More

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      Trump falsely claims wind turbines lead to whale deaths by making them ‘batty’

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      Donald Trump has launched a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”.Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.”“They are washing up ashore,” said Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and reality TV host who is facing multiple criminal indictments. “You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”Trump has a history of making false or exaggerated claims about renewable energy, previously asserting that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that the structures “kill all the birds”. In that case, experts say there is no proven link to ill health from wind turbines, and that there are far greater causes of avian deaths, such as cats or fossil fuel infrastructure. There is also little to support Trump’s foray into whale science.“He displays an astonishing lack of knowledge of whales and whale strandings,” said Andrew Read, a whale researcher and commissioner of the Marine Mammal Commission, of Trump. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all.”The US has been slow, compared with other countries, to develop offshore wind farms but several projects are now under way off the east coast, enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden as a way to boost clean energy supply and combat the climate crisis.Critics of this push, including some environmentalists, have warned that whales are being imperiled by work to install these new offshore turbines, but scientists have largely dismissed these claims. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted.Read said that there are some “broad concerns” about the overall industrialization of the oceans, but that the main threats to whales come from their being hit by boats and becoming entangled in fishing gear, and from warming oceans due to the climate change.“The population of humpback whales, in particular, is recovering from being hunted and they are coming closer to the coast to feed on prey, which means they are being hit as they come into shipping lanes, or being caught up in nets,” said Read.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spate of dead whales that washed up along New York and New Jersey’s coasts earlier this year has fueled opposition to wind turbines, however, with Republicans in New Jersey attempting to halt construction of turbines.This opposition has been embraced not only as another culture war battle but also as a way to help businesses keen to stymie clean energy, with several rightwing groups funded by fossil fuel interests linked to seemingly organic community protests against wind farms.“It’s particularly sad to see well-meaning people who care about whales being persuaded that wind turbines are a risk to them,” said Read. “They are being manipulated by fossil fuel interests who see wind energy as a threat to those interests.” More

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      Republicans in the US ‘battery belt’ embrace Biden’s climate spending

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      Republicans in the US ‘battery belt’ embrace Biden’s climate spending Southern states led by Republicans did not vote for climate spending, but now embrace clean energy dollars like never beforeGeorgia, a state once known for its peaches and peanuts, is rapidly becoming a crucible of clean energy technology in the US, leading a pack of Republican-led states enjoying a boom in renewables investment that has been accelerated by Joe Biden’s climate agenda.Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August, billions of dollars of new clean energy investment has been announced for solar, electric vehicle and battery manufacturing in Georgia, pushing it to the forefront of a swathe of southern states that are becoming a so-called “battery belt” in the economic transition away from fossil fuels.Biden’s climate bill victory was hard won. Now, the real battle startsRead more“It seems like all roads are currently leading to Georgia, it’s really benefiting disproportionately from the Inflation Reduction Act right now,” said Aaron Brickman, senior principal at energy research nonprofit RMI. Brickman said the $370bn in clean energy incentives and tax credits in the bill are a “complete game changer. We’ve just frankly never had that before in this country. The IRA has transformed the landscape in a staggering way”.Georgia is part of a pattern where Republican-headed states have claimed the lion’s share of new renewable energy and electric vehicle activity since the legislation, with Republican-held Congressional districts hosting more than 80% of all utility-scale wind or solar farms and battery projects currently in advanced development, according to an analysis by American Clean Power.States blessed with plentiful wind and sunshine, along with significant rural and industrial communities, such as those across the Great Plains and the south, appear best positioned to capitalize on the climate bill. Texas, already a bastion of wind power, could see $131bn in IRA-linked investment this decade, Florida may see $62bn and Georgia $16bn, according to an RMI analysis.The irony of this bonanza, which is coming despite no Republican voting for the climate spending, was alluded to by Biden in his recent state of the union address. “My Republican friends who voted against it – I still get asked to fund the projects in those districts as well,” the US president said, to jeers from some members of Congress. “But don’t worry, I promised I’d be a president for all Americans. We’ll fund these projects and I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.”Beeswarm bubble chart of states’ IRA climate investmentsA mixed political groundbreaking did take place in Georgia in October, when Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, was served champagne by a robotic dog before ceremonially shoveling dirt alongside Democratic senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to kick off Hyundai’s first dedicated electric vehicle plant in the US.The $5.5bn facility in Bryan county, which will create around 8,000 jobs when it opens in 2025, came about because “we heard the clarion call of this administration to hasten the adoption of new electric vehicles and reduce carbon emissions”, according to José Muñoz, Hyundai’s global president.Ossoff told the Guardian he has long held a vision that Georgia “should be the advanced energy innovation and manufacturing hub for the US” and credits a bill he wrote, the Solar Energy Manufacturing for America Act, which was then folded into the IRA, for helping convince Hanwha Qcells, another South Korean-owned company, to commit $2.5bn for two new solar panel factories in the state in January.“This targeted legislation was by no means a foregone conclusion but passing it has opened the floodgates in Georgia,” Ossoff said. Democrats have touted the bill for not only helping tackle the climate crisis but also as a way to wrest the initiative from China, which has dominated the manufacturing of parts for clean energy systems and electric cars until now.Georgia’s embrace of clean energy technology was underway before the IRA, with Atlanta, bolstered by leading renewables research at Georgia Tech, increasingly viewed as an innovative fulcrum. In 2021, Freyr, a Norwegian company, announced a $1.7bn battery plant for Coweta county, south of Atlanta, while SK Battery, yet another South Korean-owned firm, said last spring it will hire another 3,000 workers at its battery factory in Commerce, north-east of Georgia’s capital.Rivian, the electric car company, meanwhile is keen to build a sprawling $5bn facility east of Atlanta although it has faced opposition from some residents in the small town of Rutledge, who have sued to stop the development.But last year’s IRA, with its sweeping tax incentives for emissions-reducing technologies, has made the environment even more enticing. Scott Moskowitz, head of market strategy for Qcells said that Georgia has been a “great home” since 2019 but that the IRA is “some of the most ambitious clean energy policy passed anywhere in the world” and gave the Hanwha-owned company certainty to triple capacity at its site in Dalton, which already cranks out around 12,000 solar panels a day, as well as create a new complex in Cartersville that will manufacture ingots and wafers, the basic building blocks of solar panel components, made from poly silicon.“There’s a ton of opportunity and excitement in [the] clean energy sector right now,” Moskowitz said. “We’ve always had strong support from both sides of the aisle, even if there hasn’t always been agreement.”Map of recently announced clean energy projects in GeorgiaBarry Loudermilk, a Republican congressman whose House of Representatives district includes Cartersville, denied that the rush of investment is politically awkward for the GOP, accusing Biden of an “elementary school-level response” to the issue in his state of the union speech.“I’m not against this industry and I’m all about bringing in new technology, but it has to be market-driven,” Loudermilk told the Guardian. “When the government heavily subsidizes something it will crest and then fall down because the market hasn’t matured.“We aren’t ready for this (full EV and clean energy adoption). This is just subsidizing one industry over another and just throwing taxpayer dollars at something usually just leads to failure, and sets you back a decade.”Georgia is a draw for businesses due to its relatively low tax rate, transport links -including Atlanta’s busy airport and Savannah’s deep port – and a diverse and adept pool of workers, according to Loudermilk. “The days of the backwoods country bumpkin are in the past, we have educated, skilled workforce,” he said.It’s uncertain whether Loudermilk will be at the Cartersville groundbreaking, nor Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right extremist who represents the neighboring congressional district that includes Dalton. Greene has previously said the IRA is an “energy disaster” and erroneously said that global heating is “actually healthy for us”, although she has said she welcomes any new jobs to Georgia.Warned of ‘massive’ climate-led extinction, a US energy firm funded crisis denial adsRead moreKemp, meanwhile, has offered state-level incentives for firms to set up in Georgia, while denouncing Democrats for “picking winners and losers” with the national climate bill. The governor recently pitched his state as a destination for clean tech investment at Davos and has denied any hypocrisy in his stance.“Georgia is a destination state for all manner of new jobs and opportunity despite the bad policies coming out of DC – not because of them,” said a spokesman for Kemp. “Companies are choosing Georgia over places like New York and California because they know they’ll find success here, not because of the IRA.”Even if the causes for the renewables investment are in dispute, the trajectory of the transition is becoming more undeniable. As the cost of renewables continues to plummet and more Americans turn to electric cars, thanks in part to the “unprecedented scale” of the IRA, partisan divides on the issue may soften, according to Ashna Aggarwal, an associate at RMI, the energy research nonprofit.“This is a bill that benefits everyone and it actually benefits the people who weren’t necessarily in favor of the bill the most,” Aggarwal said.“I think what’s really exciting about the clean energy economy is that party lines don’t really matter here. There’s more opportunity for Republican states and I hope that Republican policymakers see that and really think this is good for the people who are living in our states.”TopicsRenewable energyEnergyClimate crisisGeorgiaUS politicsBiden administrationEnergy industryfeaturesReuse this content More

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      New York has a chance to generate all its electricity from clean energy by 2030 | Ross Barkan

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      New York has a chance to generate all its electricity from clean energy by 2030Ross BarkanIf Democrats act, New Yorkers will begin to get the government they deserve. With climate cataclysms here, the political system can’t afford more delays It has been, for progressives in New York, a trying year.Major pieces of legislation that were supposed to reshape the state to safeguard the working class have stalled out. A bill to create a statewide single-payer healthcare system is no closer to passage than it was several years ago. A push to guarantee new protections for tenants as rents soar in New York City could not find the votes. And ambitious legislation to combat climate that did have the votes to go through the state legislature was halted by the speaker of the state assembly.Unlike in Washington, Democrats in New York have no one to blame but themselves. The party holds supermajorities in both chambers, the state senate and state assembly. Progressives have grown their clout in each. A handful of socialists occupy seats as well.The trouble is that institutional forces – those aligned with the real estate and fossil fuel industries in particular – have plenty of clout, too. The left is stronger, in numbers, than it’s ever been, but the state’s power brokers are centrists or those most hesitant to challenge entrenched power structures. This is true in other Democrat-run states too, but it’s been sobering in New York where progressives have nurtured such high hopes for change.The left, of course, has gotten much further in New York in the last few years than it had in the previous decades. In 2019, Democrats took control of the state senate and immediately passed a large number of bills that had been bottled up for years. Legislation to help tenants, reduce the use of cash bail, and protect voting rights and women’s health all easily passed the body and were signed into law. In 2020, the pandemic hit and ambitious legislating was put on hold. The 2021 session was more of the same.This year offered hope. The Build Public Renewables Act, or BPRA, would mandate that the state’s public power provider, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030 and establish a process through which it can build and own renewables while closing down polluting infrastructure. The state itself could build out wind and solar energy. With its high bond rating, the NYPA could easily finance projects. Passage of the bill would have profound national implications. New York would be a leader in the fight against the climate crisis and inspire other states with Democratic governors to follow their lead. With Republicans poised to retake Congress, state-level action is crucial.Independent power producers, who fiercely oppose the BPRA, currently build out new power generation infrastructure beyond NYPA. Solar industry trade associations fought the bill bitterly. They have made inroads in the legislature.In turn, a strange thing happened: the BPRA amassed the votes to pass the state assembly – it had already passed the senate – but was never brought up for a vote before the end of the legislative session in early June. The speaker, Carl Heastie, claimed the votes were not there because, apparently, the more than 80 lawmakers who backed the bill did not inform him personally they would vote that way.Advocates and supporters, however, were certain they had the votes. At first glance, it would appear Heastie had a point, since it is theoretically true the speaker cannot know who will vote for what if he has not been told about the intentions of each lawmaker.But that’s not how lawmaking really works in Albany, the state capital. There are hundreds of bills and the speaker cannot personally hear from all legislators before one is put on the floor for a vote. Rather, most Democrats vote reflexively with the speaker unless the bill has an organized constituency in their districts that opposed it. There is no popular, grassroots outcry against the BPRA. Most New Yorkers don’t know what it is.Why did Heastie claim the votes were not there? Some moderate Democrats are wary of passing any far-reaching bills in an election year. Organized labor had opposed earlier versions of the bill, but the New York AFL-CIO had agreed to stay neutral this time. Governor Kathy Hochul may not support the BPRA either, but she would be hard-pressed to not sign the bill if it reached her desk, especially if New York’s large environmental movement and progressive infrastructure mobilized for it.The good news is that the legislation may not be dead for 2022. Though lawmakers depart Albany in June and typically don’t reconvene until the new year to pass bills, Heastie requested the chairs of the assembly’s committees on energy, corporations and environmental conservation convene a hearing on 28 July. A hearing may mean a special session – a chance to get the BPRA to Hochul’s desk before 2023.If the Democrats in Albany act as they should, New Yorkers will begin to get the government they deserve. With climate cataclysms here, the political system can’t afford any more delays.
      Ross Barkan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of Demolition Night, a novel, and The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York
      TopicsEnvironmentOpinionEnergyRenewable energyUS politicsNew YorkClimate crisiscommentReuse this content More

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      Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950s

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      Joe Biden may be pressing for 2021 to be a transformational year in tackling the climate crisis, but Republicans arrayed in opposition to his agenda have dug in around a unifying rallying theme – that the fossil fuel industry should be protected at almost any cost.For many experts and environmentalists, the Republican stance is a shockingly retrograde move that flies in the face of efforts to fight global heating and resembles a head in the sand approach to the realities of a changing American economy.In a recent letter sent to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, more than a dozen Republican state treasurers accused the administration of pressuring banks to not lend to coal, oil and gas companies, adding that such a move would “eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country” in order to appease the US president’s “radical political preferences”.The letter raised the extraordinary possibility of Republican-led states penalizing banks that refuse to fund projects that worsen the climate crisis by pulling assets from them. Riley Moore, treasurer of the coal heartland state of West Virginia, said “undue pressure” was being put on banks by the Biden administration that could end financing of fossil fuels and “devastate West Virginia and put thousands of families out of work”.“If a bank or lending institution says it is going to do something that could cause significant economic harm to our state … then I need to take that into account when I consider what banks we do business with,” Moore, who has assets of about $18bn under his purview, told the Guardian. “If they are going to attack our industries, jobs, economy and way of life, then I am going to fight back.”The shunning of banks in this way would almost certainly face a hefty legal response but the threat is just the latest eye-catching Republican gambit aimed at propping up a fossil fuel industry that will have to be radically pared back if the US is to slash its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, as Biden has vowed.In Louisiana, Republicans have embarked upon a quixotic and probably doomed attempt to make the state a “fossil fuel sanctuary” jurisdiction that does not follow federal pollution rules.In Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has instructed his agencies to challenge the “hostile attack” launched by Biden against the state’s oil and gas industries while Republicans in Wyoming have even set up a legal fund to sue other states that refuse to take its coal.The messaging appears to be filtering down to the Republican electorate, with new polling by Yale showing support for clean energy among GOP voters has dropped dramatically over the past 18 months.The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil.But critics say Republicans are engaged in a futile attempt to resurrect an economic vision more at home in the 1950s, rather than deal with a contemporary reality where the plummeting cost of wind and solar is propelling record growth in renewables and a cavalcade of countries are striving to cut emissions to net zero and, in the case of some including the UK and Germany, completely eliminate coal.“We are seeing desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, to squeeze one more drop of oil or lump of coal out of the ground before this transition,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. “They are looking to go back to a prior time, but the trend if absolutely clear. The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil.”The Republican backlash is characterized by a large dose of political posturing, according to Wagner. “If you have aspirations of higher office in some states, you just want to signal you will sue those hippie liberals,” he said. “These are delay tactics and some of them are very ham-fisted.”The US emerged from the second world war with more than half a million coalminers but this workforce has since dwindled to barely 40,000 people, amid mass automation and utilities switching to cheap sources of gas. Large quantities of jobs are set to be created in renewable energy, but some places built upon fossil fuels risk being left behind.Biden has proposed a huge infrastructure plan which would, the president says, help retrain and retool regions of the US long economically dependent upon mining and drilling. The administration has promised a glut of high-paying jobs in expanding the clean energy sector and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, all while avoiding the current ruinous health impacts of air pollution and conditions like black lung.But unions have expressed wariness over this transition, with Republicans also highly skeptical. The promise to retrain miners is a “patronizing pipe dream of the liberal elites completely devoid from reality”, said Moore, who added that previous promises of renewable energy jobs have not materialized. “And now they are trying to sell us on the same failed idea again.”However the shift to cleaner energy happens, it’s clear the transition is under way – last year renewable energy consumption eclipsed coal for the first time in 130 years and US government projections show renewables’ overall share doubling by the middle of the century. A key question is whether the completion of this switch will be delayed long enough to risk triggering the worst impacts of disastrous global heating.“The Republican response is predictable and pathetic. It is from a very old playbook,” said Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama. “The party will cling to fossil fuels to the bitter end. It’s so sad because so many Republican voters are damaged by climate change, if you look at deaths from the heat or wildfires we are seeing in California. But the party right now is just completely beholden to the fossil fuel industry.” More

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      Targets like 'net-zero' won't solve the climate crisis on their own | Mathew Lawrence

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      Last week was a critical time in the global response to the climate emergency: the US vowed to cut its emissions by at least 50% by 2030, while the UK government committed to reducing emissions by 78% by 2035, relative to a 1990 baseline. Both announcements were important steps that reflected the significance of one particular tool in climate governance: the target. From the legally binding targets in the UK’s Climate Change Act (2008) to those of the 2015 Paris agreement, targets define a sense of direction and signpost of ambition. Alone, however, targets are not enough. We need more than just targets to transition to a post-carbon future. We need planning.Despite what free-market economists may suggest, markets are not “free”, nor do they emerge spontaneously. They are created and sustained by governments, laws and political institutions, which plan how they operate and whose interests they serve. What’s more, the global economy, far from being organised by the anarchy of competition, is itself structured by institutions with vast planning power. Targets may dominate the headlines, but it’s these institutions of planning that are central to the climate struggle.Central banks are at the apex of economic planning. The actions of central banks during the Covid-19 emergency, such as buying assets to stabilise turbulent financial markets and controlling interest rates, reflect the coordinating function they perform. Financial institutions, from banks to treasuries, also structure the global economy and plan our economic and environmental future by choosing which businesses and activities to invest in. Decisions about who gets liquidity and who doesn’t are the difference between a business living or dying, stagnating or thriving.These economic institutions all have a common theme. They are responsible for planning, and therefore bringing to life one particular version of the future that is accelerating environmental breakdown and stark inequality. The world’s biggest 60 banks, for instance, have provided $3.8tn of financing for fossil fuel companies since 2015. The Bank of England’s corporate bond holdings as of June 2020 are consistent with – and contribute towards – catastrophic average temperature increases of 3.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, and provide no-strings attached finance to carbon-intensive companies. These priorities are also reflected in the UK’s public policies; while the government has committed itself to climate targets, it still supports the development of fossil fuel extraction and carbon-intensive infrastructure, while providing inadequate support for low-carbon public transport or net-zero housing.Announcing new climate targets without rethinking how our global economy is planned can quickly amount to “greenwashing”. In 2018, the increase in fossil fuel production was more than three times higher than in renewables. Since then, fossil fuel giants have announced “net-zero” goals that still envisage a critical role for oil, gas and coal in 2100. In this way climate targets can give a green veneer to plans that merely continue the carbon-intensive status quo.The political challenge is to ensure that planning itself is more democratic and centred on meeting our needs and decarbonising our economy. To reach the UK and world’s climate targets, we’ll need to reimagine planning: the tools we use, the time horizons involved, the voices and values that shape these plans, and how they are enacted. This is not about centralising power in an unresponsive and overweening state, turning our futures over to algorithmic decision-making, or further concentrating corporate power. Instead, it’s about prioritising our ability to plan for the common good: in our homes, in our communities, and in a democratic economy, from workplaces and markets to the state.What might this look like? As John Maynard Keynes foresaw when he called for the steady socialisation of finance and the “euthanasia of the rentier” in 1936, investment should be organised by needs, rather than short-term profits. In our era of sustained economic stagnation, we can’t afford to wait for a revival of capitalist dynamism to trigger investment. Instead, governments should be coordinating a green industrial strategy and heavily investing to build the low-carbon infrastructures, industries and institutions we need. There is so much to be done, and yet current plans fall dangerously short; even Biden’s much-trumpeted infrastructure plan fails to deliver the levels of public investment needed to decarbonise at the pace and scale the climate emergency requires.If we’re to rethink how planning works, central banks will play a crucial role. By consciously embracing their planning function, central banks could steer societies toward rapid decarbonisation. They could do this through changing the relative cost of “green” versus “dirty” capital, for example, by enforcing higher capital requirements for carbon-intensive industries and guiding credit to low-carbon activities. They could also introduce new, socially just rules for carbon pricing that would ensure private investment is geared towards tackling the climate crisis.Part of rethinking planning will also involve rethinking the tools that are used to organise the global economy: the legal contracts, accounting and auditing processes, property claims and financial flows at the heart of it. Currently, these tools and processes are geared towards maximising short-term returns in an economy that excludes ordinary workers and communities from decision-making. We need to refocus these on securing social and environmental wellbeing.Targets are necessary, but they’re only half of the picture. In addition to setting ambitious goals, governments now need to decarbonise the global economy and democratise how it is planned and organised. Our economy isn’t a natural state, but a malleable creation. We still retain the power to reimagine what version of the future it is hurtling towards – and now we must urgently embrace this. More