Climate impacts set to cut 2050 global GDP by nearly a fifth
Marlowe Hood – April 17, 2024
A new study shows that climate change will cause massive economic damage within the next 25 years (Frederic J. BROWN)
Climate change caused by CO2 emissions already in the atmosphere will shrink global GDP in 2050 by about $38 trillion, or almost a fifth, no matter how aggressively humanity cuts carbon pollution, researchers said Wednesday.
But slashing greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible remains crucial to avoid even more devastating economic impacts after mid-century, they reported in the journal Nature.
Economic fallout from climate change, the study shows, could increase tens of trillions of dollars per year by 2100 if the planet were to warm significantly beyond two degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels.
Earth’s average surface temperature has already climbed 1.2C above that benchmark, enough to amplify heatwaves, droughts, flooding and tropical storms made more destructive by rising seas.
Annual investment needed to cap global warming below 2C — the cornerstone goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement — is a small fraction of the damages that would be avoided, the researchers found.
Staying under the 2C threshold “could limit average regional income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent” in a high-emissions scenario, lead author Max Kotz, an expert in complexity science at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), told AFP.
Economists disagree on how much should be spent to avoid climate damages. Some call for massive investment now, while others argue it would be more cost-effective to wait until societies are richer and technology more advanced.
– Poor countries hit hardest –
The new research sidesteps this debate, but its eye-watering estimate of economic impacts helps make the case for ambitious near-term action, the authors and other experts said.
“Our calculations are super relevant” to such cost-benefit analyses, said co-author Leonie Wenz, also a researcher at PIK.
They could also inform government strategies for adapting to climate impacts, risk assessments for business, and UN-led negotiations over compensation for developing nations that have barely contributed to global warming, she told AFP.
Mostly tropical nations — many with economies already shrinking due to climate damages — will be hit hardest, the study found.
“Countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60 percent greater than the higher-income countries and 40 percent greater than higher-emission countries,” said senior PIK scientist Anders Levermann.
“They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts.”
Rich countries will not be spared either: Germany and the United States are forecast to see income shrivel by 11 percent by 2050, and France by 13 percent.
Projections are based on four decades of economic and climate data from 1,600 regions rather than country-level statistics, making it possible to include damages earlier studies ignored, such as extreme rainfall.
– A likely underestimate –
The researchers also looked at temperature fluctuations within each year rather than just averages, as well as the economic impact of extreme weather events beyond the year in which they occurred.
“By accounting for these additional climate variables, the damages are about 50 percent larger than if we were to only include changes in annual average temperatures,” the basis of most prior estimates, said Wenz.
Wenz and her colleagues found that unavoidable damage would slash the global economy’s GPD by 17 percent in 2050, compared to a scenario with no additional climate impacts after 2020.
Even so, the new calculations may be conservative.
“They are likely to be an underestimate of the costs of climate change impacts,” Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London, commented to AFP ahead of the study’s publication.
Damages linked to sea-level rise, stronger tropical cyclones, the destabilisation of ice sheets and the decline of major tropical forests are all excluded, he noted.
Climate economist Gernot Wagner, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York who was also not involved in the study, said the conclusion that “trillions in damages are all locked in doesn’t mean that cutting carbon pollution doesn’t pay.”
In fact, he said, it shows that “the costs of acting are a fraction of the costs of unmitigated climate change”.
Global GDP in 2022 was just over $100 trillion, according to the World Bank. The study projects that — absent climate impacts after 2020 — it would be double that in 2050.
Climate change damage could cost $38 trillion per year by 2050, study finds
Riham Alkousaa – April 17, 2024
FILE PHOTO: French lake dries up due to winter drought, threatening farming and tourism
BERLIN (Reuters) – Damage to farming, infrastructure, productivity, and health from climate change will cost an estimated $38 trillion per year by 2050, German government-backed research finds, a figure almost certain to rise as human activity emits more greenhouse gases.
The economic impact of climate change is not fully understood, and economists often disagree on its extent.
Wednesday’s study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which is backed by the German government, stands out for the severity of its findings.
It calculates climate change will shave 17% off the global economy’s GDP by the middle of the century.
“The world population is poorer than it would be without climate change,” Potsdam climate data researcher Leonie Wenz, a co-author on the study, said. “It costs us much less to protect the climate than not to.”
At an estimated $6 trillion, the cost of measures to limit global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) of pre-industrial temperatures by 2050 would be less than a sixth of the cost of the estimated damage caused by allowing warming to exceed that level, the report said.
While previous studies have concluded climate change could benefit some countries’ economies, PIK’s research found almost all would suffer – with poor, developing nations the hardest hit.
Its estimation of damage is based on projected temperature and rainfall trends, but does not take into account extreme weather or other climate-related disasters such as forest fires or rising sea levels.
It is also only based on emissions already released, even though global emissions continue to rise at record levels.
As well as spending too little to curb climate-warming emissions, governments are also under-spending on measures to adapt to the impact of climate change.
For the study, the researchers looked at temperature data and rainfall for more than 1,600 regions over the last 40 years, and considered which of these events were costly.
They then used that damage assessment, along with climate model projections, to estimate future damage.
If emissions continue at today’s rate – and the average global temperature climbs beyond 4C – the estimated economic toll after 2050 amounts to a 60% income loss by 2100, the findings suggest. Limiting the rise in temperatures to 2C would contain those losses at an average of 20%.
(Reporting by Riham Alkousaa, Editing by Rachel More, Katy Daigle and Barbara Lewis)
New study calculates climate change’s economic bite will hit about $38 trillion a year by 2049
Seth Borenstein – April 17, 2024
People watch the sunset at a park on an unseasonably warm day, Feb. 25, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. A new study says climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% in the next 25 years compared to a fictional world that’s not warming. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)A man buys a cool drink from a roadside vendor on a sunny day in Mahawewa, a village north of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Feb. 29, 2024. A new study says climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% in the next 25 years compared to a fictional world that’s not warming. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena, File)
Climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% in the next 25 years compared to a fictional world that’s not warming, with the poorest areas and those least responsible for heating the atmosphere taking the biggest monetary hit, a new study said.
Climate change’s economic bite in how much people make is already locked in at about $38 trillion a year by 2049, according to Wednesday’s study in the journal Nature by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. By 2100 the financial cost could hit twice what previous studies estimate.
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a climate scientist and economist.
These damages are compared to a baseline of no climate change and are then applied against overall expected global growth in gross domestic product, said study lead author Max Kotz, a climate scientist. So while it’s 19% globally less than it could have been with no climate change, in most places, income will still grow, just not as much because of warmer temperatures.
For the past dozen years, scientists and others have been focusing on extreme weather such as heat waves, floods, droughts, storms as the having the biggest climate impact. But when it comes to financial hit the researchers found “the overall impacts are still mainly driven by average warming, overall temperature increases,” Kotz said. It harms crops and hinders labor production, he said.
In the United States, the southeastern and southwestern states get economically pinched more than the northern ones with parts of Arizona and New Mexico taking the biggest monetary hit, according to the study. In Europe, southern regions, including parts of Spain and Italy, get hit harder than places like Denmark or northern Germany.
Only Arctic adjacent areas — Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland and Sweden — benefit, Kotz said.
It also means countries which have historically produced fewer greenhouse gas emissions per person and are least able to financially adapt to warming weather are getting the biggest financial harms too, Kotz said.
The world’s poorest countries will suffer 61% bigger income loss than the richest ones, the study calculated.
“It underlies some of the injustice elements of climate,” Kotz said.
This new study looked deeper than past research, examining 1,600 global areas that are smaller than countries, took several climate factors into account and examined how long climate economic shocks last, Kotz said. The study examined past economic impacts on average global domestic product per person and uses computer simulations to look into the future to come up with their detailed calculations.
The study shows that the economic harms over the next 25 years are locked in with emission cuts producing only small changes in the income reduction. But in the second half of this century that’s when two different possible futures are simulated, showing that cutting carbon emissions now really pays off because of how the heat-trapping gases accumulate, Kotz said.
If the world could curb carbon pollution and get down to a trend that limits warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, which is the upper limit of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, then the financial hit will stay around 20% in global income, Kotz said. But if emissions increase in a worst case scenario, the financial wallop will be closer to 60%, he said.
That shows that the public shouldn’t think it’s a financial “doomsday” and nothing can be done, Kotz said.
Still, it’s worse than a 2015 study that predicted a worst case income hit of about 25% by the end of the century.
Marshall Burke, the Stanford University climate economist who wrote the 2015 study, said this new research’s finding that the economic damage ahead is locked in and large “makes a lot of sense.”
Burke, who wasn’t part of this study, said he has some issues with some of the technical calculations “so I wouldn’t put a ton of weight on their specific numerical estimates, but I think the big picture is basically right.”
The conclusions are on the high end compared to other recent studies, but since climate change goes for a long time and economic damage from higher temperatures keep compounding, they “add up to very large numbers,” said University of California Davis economist and environmental studies professor Frances Moore, who wasn’t part of the study. That’s why fighting climate change clearly passes economists’ tests of costs versus benefits, she said.
Trump Allies Have a Plan to Hurt Biden’s Chances: Elevate Outsider Candidates
Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Shane Goldmacher and Rebecca Davis O’Brien – April 10, 2024
Two Skyhorse Publishing titles by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democrat running for president, in the office of the company’s founder, Tony Lyons, in New York, Aug. 10, 2023. (Jeenah Moon/The New York Times)
Allies of former President Donald Trump are discussing ways to elevate third-party candidates in battleground states to divert votes away from President Joe Biden, along with other covert tactics to diminish Democratic votes.
They plan to promote independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a “champion for choice” to give voters for whom abortion is a top issue — and who also don’t like Biden — another option on the ballot, according to one person who is involved in the effort and who, like several others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.
Trump allies also plan to amplify the progressive environmental records of Kennedy and expected Green Party candidate Jill Stein in key states — contrasting their policies against the record-high oil production under Biden that has disappointed some climate activists.
A third parallel effort in Michigan is meant to diminish Democratic turnout in November by amplifying Muslim voters’ concerns about Biden’s support for Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. Trump allies are discussing running ads in Dearborn, Michigan, and other parts of the state with large Muslim populations that would thank Biden for standing with Israel, according to three people familiar with the effort, which is expected to be led by an outside group unaffiliated with the Trump campaign.
Many of these third-party-boosting efforts will probably be run out of dark-money entities that are loosely supportive of Trump. Both the Trump campaign and the main super political action committee supporting the former president, MAGA Inc., are already aggressively framing Kennedy as a far-left radical to draw potential Democratic voters away from Biden.
Whatever the mechanism, the Trump team’s view is simple and is backed by public and private polling: The more candidates in the race, the better for Trump. Biden’s team agrees. And in a race that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes — as the last two presidential elections have been — even small shifts in the share of votes could change the result.
“There is no question that in a close presidential race, independent or minor party candidates can have a disproportionately large impact,” said Roger Stone, who is Trump’s longest-serving political adviser and who has worked on third-party campaigns, including advising Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s nominee in 2012.
Republican donors are pouring funds into Kennedy’s independent bid for the presidency. He has raised substantially more from donors who previously supported Trump than he has from those who backed Biden. Some are big names in Republican politics who have so far given relatively small amounts, including $3,300 last August from Elizabeth Uihlein, whose family is among the GOP’s biggest contributors.
Timothy Mellon, the largest single donor to Kennedy’s biggest super PAC, is also the largest backer of MAGA Inc. Mellon, a reclusive billionaire from one of America’s wealthiest families, has over the past year given the Kennedy super PAC $20 million and the Trump super PAC $15 million, as of the most recent disclosures that were filed in March. Another prominent Kennedy backer is Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who worked with Trump on his effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump himself is intensely interested in the third-party candidates, according to aides. He is eager to know what their effect is expected to be on the race and how they are polling, although his engagement beyond asking questions of those around him is unclear.
Trump has been worried about the Libertarian Party pulling conservative voters away from him in November. But Richard Grenell, who is the former acting director of national intelligence and who is expected to play a big role in any second Trump administration, has been using his connections with Libertarian activists and donors to try to persuade them to attack Biden more than Trump, according to people familiar with his efforts.
Other Trump supporters are trying to help third-party and independent candidates with the expensive and arduous process of gathering the signatures needed to get on state ballots. Scott Presler, the conservative activist whom Lara Trump said she wanted as an early hire at the Republican National Committee, publicly reached out on social media to Stein and Cornel West, a left-wing academic who is running for president as an independent, to offer his help in collecting signatures to get them on the ballot.
Presler could not be reached for comment.
The moves by Trump allies come as the Democratic Party, alarmed by the potential for third-party candidates to swing the election, has mobilized a team of lawyers to scrutinize outsider candidates, including looking into whether they’ve followed the rules to get on state ballots.
For decades, third-party candidacies have loomed large in U.S. presidential elections. The best known in modern history is Ross Perot, whose run as a billionaire populist independent in 1992 garnered 19% of the vote and helped Bill Clinton win with only 43% of the popular vote. Ralph Nader, a Green Party candidate, siphoned votes away from Vice President Al Gore in the nail-biter 2000 presidential race against George W. Bush.
And in 2016, Stein, as the Green Party candidate, gave a meaningful — and arguably election-deciding — boost to Trump by drawing progressive voters away from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. That year, billionaire businessperson and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a supporter of Trump, helped fund efforts to bolster Stein.
Polling shows that third-party candidates could play an especially large role in 2024. Most Americans are unhappy with the choice between Trump and Biden. Voters are increasingly disillusioned with the two major parties, and trust in American institutions has eroded over the past 30 years. Those trends provide an opening for candidates who style themselves as anti-establishment outsiders willing to blow up the system. Trump took advantage of similar conditions in 2016.
In a Quinnipiac University poll in late March, Biden and Trump both received less than 40% of the vote in a hypothetical five-way race, with Kennedy getting 13%, Stein receiving 4% and West capturing 3%.
In the multicandidate race, Trump led by a single percentage point; Biden led Trump by 3 percentage points in a hypothetical head-to-head race.
“The path to victory here is clearly maximizing the reach of these left-wing alternatives,” said Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who also served as Trump’s campaign chair in 2016.
“No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do,” Bannon added. “Stein is furious about the oil drilling. The college kids are furious about it. The more exposure these guys get, the better it is for us.”
Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for Trump, described Kennedy as a “leftist and liberal with a history of supporting an extreme environmental agenda.” He said more broadly of the Democratic push to challenge outsider candidates, “While Joe Biden and his allies claim to defend democracy, they are using financial and legal resources to prevent candidates access to the ballot.”
“President Trump believes any candidate who qualifies for the ballot should be allowed to make their case to America’s voters,” he added.
For months, the Trump team has been privately polling various iterations of third-party tickets in battleground states. It has concluded that candidates floated for the Green Party and No Labels, which recently abandoned its effort to field a presidential candidate, pulled substantially more votes from Biden than from Trump.
A person briefed on other polling by Trump allies said that while it varies by state, Kennedy also pulls more votes from Biden than from Trump. The person cited as an example the Trump team’s recent private polling of voters in Arizona. Trump loses Hispanic voters by a close margin in a head-to-head contest against Biden there, but he wins Hispanic voters on the full ballot in Arizona — an indication that third-party candidates draw more heavily from Biden’s core constituencies than from Trump’s.
Still, Kennedy is seen as more of a potential threat to Trump. He has spent the past few years appearing on conservative news media programs and talking about issues like his fierce opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine. Advisers to Trump say that many Republican voters don’t know anything about Kennedy’s liberal views on gun control and the environment, and the Trump team hopes to bring back some of those voters after framing Kennedy as a liberal Democrat.
Allies of Trump and Biden are in a tug of war to define Kennedy, who has far more support than any other third-party candidate.
Democratic lawyers and operatives, many of whom have privately said that neither Gore nor Hillary Clinton had teams that took third-party candidates seriously enough, are fighting hard to keep Kennedy off the ballot. The Democratic National Committee hired Lis Smith, a veteran communications operative, and tasked her with branding Kennedy as a pro-Trump spoiler candidate.
Kennedy’s campaign and the super PACs backing him have paid an array of lawyers and consultants to secure ballot access. One of the consultants, Rita Palma, was captured in a video detailing a strategy to encourage New York voters to support Kennedy: “The Kennedy voter and the Trump voter, our mutual enemy is Biden.” Palma outlined a hypothetical scenario in which Kennedy would win enough electoral votes to prevent either Trump or Biden from winning 270 electoral votes, pushing the decision to Congress in what is known as a contingent election.
On her account on the social platform X, Palma has expressed support over the years for both Kennedy and Trump. In posts first reported by CNN on Tuesday, she had endorsed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and described Sidney Powell, who has pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts related to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, as “my person of the decade.”
Stefanie Spear, a spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign, described Palma as “a ballot-access consultant” for upcoming signature collection efforts in New York. Of Palma’s remarks about the hypothetical scenario, Spear said Palma’s statements “in no way reflect the strategy of the Kennedy campaign.”
Spear did not respond to requests for comment about the Trump allies’ efforts to elevate Kennedy, or to inquiries about Palma’s support for Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.
Many conservative news media personalities and influencers recently turned against Kennedy after he decided to run as an independent instead of as a Democrat and it became apparent that he could pull votes from Trump.
Still, one complication with attacking Kennedy is that Trump has made clear that he likes him.
Trump put out a statement on Truth Social, his social media platform, that called Kennedy “a radical-left Democrat,” but he has mostly laid off him otherwise. Trump has called Kennedy a “very smart person” and has even privately floated him as a potential running mate, though his advisers view that prospect as extremely unlikely.
An outside group aligned with Trump asked a question about a Trump-Kennedy ticket in a poll several weeks ago, according to a person with knowledge of the survey. The results were not particularly striking. Trump had told an ally that he believed Kennedy could help him with voters who were upset with him for his support of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I like Trump-Kennedy. I like the way that sounds,” Trump told another ally recently. “There’s something about that that I like.”
EPA’s New Rule Aims to Cut Toxic Emissions, But Cancer Alley Air Pollution Could Worsen
Legal challenges could delay the EPA’s ability to enact the measures, which coincide with Louisiana activists’ fight against projects poised to increase air pollution.
By Julie Dermansky – April 10, 2024
Barbara Washington with Inclusive Louisiana speaks out against the expansion of Koch Industries’ methanol plant, April 8, 2024. Credit: Julie Dermansky
Leaders in the fight for clean air from Louisiana’s Cancer Alley joined the Environmental Protection Agency’s Administrator Michael Regan on April 9 in Washington, D.C., for the announcement of a new rule governing air toxics-spewing chemical plants. The rule is intended to prevent cancer in surrounding low-income and minority communities.
The announcement represents a milestone for environmental justice in communities historically overburdened by air-toxics pollution. But a growing number of proposed industrial projects threaten to further pollute the mostly low-income Black neighborhoods along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — already home to a large number of petrochemical plants and refineries.
Robert Taylor, leader of the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, and Sharon Lavigne, head of RISE St. James, expressed gratitude to Regan for setting the new rules. They praised him for following through with his promise to help their communities, though both activists are painfully aware that the fight for environmental justice is far from over.
Robert Taylor with the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish in the Zion Travelers Cemetery next to the Marathon Refinery, April 6, 2024. Credit: Julie Dermansky
The EPA stressed that the regulations, which pertain to synthetic organic chemical plants and polymer- and resin-producing facilities, will dramatically reduce the risk of elevated air toxics-related cancer in communities surrounding plants that emit ethylene oxide (EtO), chloroprene, and other dangerous chemicals, officials said. Rules pertaining to EtO and chloroprene have been years in the making.
The new regulations for EtO, chloroprene, benzene, vinyl chloride, 1,3 butadiene, and ethylene dichloride emissions pertains to over 200 manufacturing facilities across the nation that emit one or more of the hazardous chemicals.
One of Evonik’s facilities in St. John the Baptist Parish, which is a source for EtO emissions, April 8, 2024. Credit: Julie DermanskyA Dow Chemical facility in Lake Charles Parish was identified by the EPA as being one of the largest emitters of Eto in the country, Jan. 12, 2024. Credit: Julie Dermansky
On April 8, RISE St. James and Inclusive Louisiana, another Cancer Alley community advocacy group in St. James, held back-to-back press conferences before meeting in court to challenge St. James Parish officials for permitting Koch Industries’ planned expansion of its looming methanol plant in St. James, which is already underway.
Gail LeBoeuf In front of Inclusive Louisiana’s new headquarters in St. James Parish, April 8, 2024. Credit: Julie DermanskyPam Spees, far right, an attorney representing the Cancer Alley plaintiffs speaks at Inclusive Louisiana’s press conference on April 8, 2024. Credit: Julie Dermansky
Community members argue that the parish council didn’t weigh the potential damage from the plant’s pollution against its economic benefits. “We have had enough of them telling us about jobs and the economy when our health is suffering,” Barbara Washington, one of the founders of Inclusive Louisiana, said before the hearing began. Gail LeBoeuf, another founding member of Inclusive Louisiana, concurred, adding that the economic gains to the community from the plant expansion are negligible.
The “parish and Koch attorneys say the groups have misread and misapplied the parish’s land-use laws and engaged in ‘hyperbole’ over the expansion’s pollution levels and its possible health impacts on its neighbors,” according to the Advocate, a Louisiana newspaper.
Koch Industries’ methanol facility in St. James, October 22, 2022. Credit: Julie DermanskyA former high school in St. James Parish is now an administrative office for Koch Industries’ methanol plant, Oct 22, 2022. Credit: Julie Dermansky
The fact that Koch Industries’ administrative office is located in a former high school, which Yuhuang Chemical Industries bought from the parish’s school board a few years ago before selling it to Koch, shows how the parish favors industry over community concerns, according to members of RISE St. James and Inclusive Louisiana. They allege that the sale of the facility, which had been renovated shortly before its sale to a chemical company, was part of the parish’s plan to depopulate the Fifth District, where Formosa Plastics plans to build its massive petrochemical complex.
Members of the Descendants Project, another Cancer Alley community group, attended the St. John the Baptist Parish’s council meeting held on April 9, to voice opposition to a vote the council held to weaken environmental protections already in place. The council voted 7 to 2 to alter its zoning rules — which in turn granted a waiver to Greenfield LA to exempt them from a 2,000-foot setback, bringing the company one step closer to building a proposed grain elevator project. The controversial facility, if realized, will subject the community to additional air pollution. The Descendants Project asserts the grain elevator will destroy its community’s way of life by further industrializing the once pastoral region. Greenfield, like Koch, contends that its project will be an asset to the community and will not harm it.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan, left, Robert Taylor, middle, the founder of the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, and Lydia Gerard, far right, walk to the Fifth Ward Elementary School during Regan’s “Journey for Justice Tour,” November 16, 2021. Credit: Julie DermanskySharon Lavigne with EPA Administrator Michael Regan in St. James Parish, Nov. 16, 2021. Credit: Julie Dermansky
At the announcement of the new EPA rule, Regan reflected on his first visit to Robert Taylor’s community in November 2021 on his “Journey to Justice” tour. He said the Black students at the Fifth Ward Elementary School who were exposed to chloroprene emissions from the nearby Dupont/Denka manufacturing facility, reminded him of his son. Regan said that listening to Cancer Alley community members and others exposed to toxic chemicals across the Gulf south during that trip inspired him to use his “bully pulpit” to protect them as much as he could, and praised the Biden administration for directing him to do so.
Before the new rule was announced, Taylor, whose community has the dubious distinction of being the only one in the U.S. exposed to EtO and chloroprene, expressed concern to me that despite the new EPA regulations, the children that go to the Fifth Ward Elementary School will continue to be bombarded with toxic emissions until the rule is enacted. He is outraged that students still attend the school, and he can not understand why, even after the EPA sent a highly critical letter to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and the state’s Board of Health that encouraged the state regulators to direct the St. John the Baptist School Board to relocate the children.
The EPA does arguably have the power to shut down the plant, though it would not give me a yes or a no when I asked the agency if it does. When the EPA had the Department of Justice file a complaint against Denka in 2023, it cited an emergency power granted in Section 303 of the Clean Air Act that not only empowers the agency to take legal action, but also to use its authority to address risks before they cause harm. This includes the ability to stop a facility from operating for at least 60 days while other measures are being considered if the EPA deems its emissions to be an imminent and substantial endangerment to the public health or welfare of the environment.
Lavigne, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts fighting against petrochemical plants in 2021, had to walk back her claims of victory against Formosa Plastic’s proposed multi-billion-dollar plastic manufacturing complex earlier this year. Louisiana’s First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the LDEQ’s decision to issue air pollution permits for the project, which a lower court had revoked in 2022.
RISE St. James continues to call on the Biden administration to protect its community by directing the the U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers to deny Formosa Plastics a permit to build in designated wetlands. In November 2020, the Corp. revoked a permit it issued to the company after acknowledging errors in its original analysis.
Wilma Subra in her office in Iberia Parish, March 3, 2024. Credit: Julie Dermansky
Environmental scientist and community advocate Wilma Subra, who was part of a team of environmental justice advocates that advised the EPA on the finalized rule on chemical plants, was hesitant to hail the new regulation as a major victory. “While there is a lot to cheer about,” she told me on a call after the rule was announced, “only time will tell if they will ever be enacted.”
Subra noted that legal challenges and/or a change in who is running the White House could derail the rule from being enacted. And even if the new rule is put in place, the companies impacted by it have a grace period between 90 days and up to two years to comply with different requirements included in it. Meanwhile, Louisiana is poised to welcome more polluting facilities to Cancer Alley and to allow existing ones to expand.
Like Taylor, Subra is dismayed that students still attend the Fifth Ward Elementary School. She warned school board members in 2023 about the cumulative health impacts that exposure to nearby toxic emssions can have, especially on children.
A flare at Shell’s Norco Manufacturing Complex in St. Charles Parish, Jan. 19, 2024. Credit: Julie DermanskyExxonmobil Baton Rouge Refinery and Chemical Complex, Jan. 17, 2024. Credit: Julie Dermansky
Subra also pointed out that with more extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists due to climate change, like the cold snaps in south Louisiana this winter when temperatures dipped below freezing for a few days in a row, chemical plants often release toxic emissions well beyond their permitted levels. While the new rule could lead to a decrease in some toxic emissions when these types of pollution incidents occur, it is unclear how much impact the new rule could have during these events.
Julie Dermansky is a multimedia reporter and artist based in New Orleans. She is an affiliate scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. Visit her website at www.jsdart.com.
PFAS is everywhere, including drinking water. A researcher pouring a water sample.
Almost half the tap water in the United States contains PFAS, a class of chemicals linked to serious health problems. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that, for the first time, municipal utilities will have to detect and remove PFAS from drinking water.
Here’s what you need to know.
What are PFAS?
In 1938 a young chemist working on refrigerants for Dupont accidentally discovered a new compound that was remarkably resistant to water and grease, a finding that would lead to the creation of the Teflon brand of nonstick cookware.
Today there are nearly 15,000 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which collectively go by the acronym PFAS, according to a database maintained by the EPA.
The common link is that they have a special bond of carbon and fluoride atoms, making them incredibly strong and resistant to heat, water, oil and dirt. For that reason, PFAS is used for everyday items as varied as microwave popcorn bags, water-repellent clothing and stain-resistant carpets. PFAS are also in firefighting foam, cosmetics, shampoos, toys and even dental floss.
Where are PFAS?
Everywhere, including drinking water. The indestructible nature that makes PFAS useful in some products also makes them harmful. The chemicals are virtually indestructible and do not fully degrade, accumulating in the environment and the human body.
The chemicals are so ubiquitous that they can be found in the blood of almost every person in the country. One recent government study detected PFAS chemicals in nearly half the nation’s tap water. A global study of more than 45,000 water samples around the world found that about 31% of tested groundwater samples that weren’t near any obvious source of contamination had PFAS levels considered harmful to human health.
What does PFAS do to the body?
According to the EPA, exposure to PFAS can cause damage to the liver and immune system and also has been linked to low birth weight, birth defects and developmental delays as well as increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers. New research published in the past year found links between PFAS exposure and a delay in the onset of puberty in girls, leading to a higher incidence of breast cancer, renal disease and thyroid disease; a decrease in bone density in teenagers, potentially leading to osteoporosis; and an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes in women.
Why didn’t the EPA regulate PFAS in water sooner?
Many environmental advocates argue that PFAS contamination should have been dealt with long ago.
“For generations, PFAS chemicals slid off every federal environmental law like a fried egg off a Teflon pan,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Activists blame chemical companies, which for decades hid evidence of the dangers of PFAS, according to lawsuits and a peer-reviewed study, published in the Annals of Global Health, of previously secret industry documents.
The new EPA rule requires utilities to reduce PFAS in drinking water to near-zero levels.
How can I get rid of PFAS?
Not easily. In homes, filters attached to faucets or in pitchers generally do not remove PFAS substances. Under-sink reverse-osmosis systems have been shown to remove most but not all PFAS in studies performed by scientists at Duke University and North Carolina State University.
Municipal water systems can install one of several technologies including carbon filtration or a reverse-osmosis water filters that can reduce levels of the chemicals.
Now that limits have been set, when will PFAS disappear from tap water?
It could take years. Under the rule, a water system has three years to monitor and report its PFAS levels. Then, if the levels exceed the EPA’s new standard, the utility will have another two years to purchase and install filtration technology.
But trade groups and local governments are expected to mount legal challenges against the regulation, potentially delaying it even before a court makes a final ruling. And if former President Donald Trump were to retake the White House in November, his administration could also reverse or weaken the rule.
Arizona abortion ruling, which Democrats decry, splits Republicans and abortion opponents
Libby Cathey and Oren Oppenheim – April 9, 2024
The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday to uphold a near-total abortion ban predating Arizona’s statehood has drawn differing reactions from state Republicans who previously claimed to be “100% pro-life” while both local and national Democrats vowed to push to protect abortion access in one of the most politically important states on the 2024 map.
Vice President Kamala Harris is planning to travel to Tucson on Friday for her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms,” where she’s expected to continue to squarely blame former President Donald Trump for appointing three of the justices who voted in 2022 to overrule Roe v. Wade’s national guarantees to abortion access.
Since then, efforts to either protect or expand abortion rights have succeeded in both red and blue states around the country when put up directly for a vote.
“Arizona just rolled back the clock to a time before women could vote – and, by his own admission, there’s one person responsible: Donald Trump,” Harris said in a statement on Tuesday.
She argued Trump would sign a federal abortion ban if elected again and “if he has the opportunity,” though Trump this week put out a new statement insisting that he wants to leave the choice to individual states — without specifying what he would do on a national ban.
President Joe Biden, in a statement through the White House, also blasted the Arizona ban, which only has exceptions to save the life of the pregnant woman. Biden called the restrictions “cruel” and the “result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom.”
The ban is temporarily blocked pending a trial court decision. Anyone found guilty of violating the ban will face two to five years in state prison.
Republicans, meanwhile, appear to be walking a tightrope on the issue.
PHOTO: U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, R-Ariz., takes questions at a news conference, Feb. 29, 2024, in Phoenix. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images, FILE)
Senate candidate Kari Lake, who narrowly lost the governor’s race in 2022, said she supports Trump’s stance on abortion, that he’d leave it up to states, and claimed she would oppose both “federal funding” and “federal ban[s]” on abortion in the Senate.
“I wholeheartedly agree with President Trump — this is a very personal issue that should be determined by each individual state and her people,” Lake said in a statement Tuesday. “I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on [Gov.] Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support. Ultimately, Arizona voters will make the decision on the ballot come November.”
However, Lake also regularly says she’s “100% pro-life” and supports “saving as many babies as possible.”
Asked last month how she would vote on a pro-abortion access initiative if it made it on the ballot in Arizona, Lake dismissed the question to simply say, “I’m pro-life.”
PHOTO: Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., questions Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on the ‘FY2024 Request for the United States Department of Education,’ in Rayburn Building on April 18, 2023. (Tom Williams/AP, FILE)
Freshman Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who represents a swing district, also called Tuesday’s ruling “a disaster for women and providers” — after having praised the U.S. Supreme Court decision against Roe two years ago and after having said he’ll support a preexisting 15-week ban in his state regarding abortion.
“In Arizona, our 15 week law protected the rights of women and new life. It respected women and the difficult decision of ending a pregnancy – one I will never personally experience and won’t pretend to understand,” Ciscomani wrote in a post on X, adding, “I oppose a national abortion ban. The territorial law is archaic. We must do better for women and I call on our state policymakers to immediately address this in a bipartisan manner.”
Former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey posted on social media that the decision was not his “preferred” outcome and urged elected leaders to find “a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.” However, Ducey also appointed the four justices who supported the court’s majority in the opinion.
“I signed the 15-week law as Governor because it is thoughtful policy, and an approach to this very sensitive issue that Arizonans can actually agree on,” Ducey wrote on X. “The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.”
Republican strategist Barrett Marson called the ruling “ground-shifting” for Arizona politics and argued the decision will reverberate through November’s elections, even if lawmakers do meet in the meantime for a special session to change the law amid public fallout.
“The Arizona Supreme Court ruling may be a huge victory for the pro-life movement in Arizona, it will be short term. The decision will only bring out more voters in 2024 to approve the abortion initiative and likely vote for Democratic candidates,” Marson said in a series of posts on X on Tuesday. “When [Gov. Katie] Hobbs calls a special session to open access to abortion and repeal the 1864 law, Republicans will be in a difficult spot.”
PHOTO: Arizona Supreme Court Justices from left; William G. Montgomery, John R Lopez IV, Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer, Chief Justice Robert M. Brutinel, Clint Bolick and James Beene listen to oral arguments on April 20, 2021, in Phoenix. (Matt York/AP, FILE)
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, expected to face Lake in the Senate race in the fall, seized on her previously calling the pre-statehood ban a “great law” and sent a fundraising pitch to supporters reminding them that as a senator he would vote to end the filibuster rule as a means to protect abortion access nationwide, unlike Lake.
“This is not what Arizonans want, and women could die because of it,” Gallego said in a statement. “Yet again, extremist politicians like Kari Lake are forcing themselves into doctors’ offices and ripping away the right for women to make their own healthcare decisions,” adding he’s “committed to doing whatever it takes to protect abortion rights at the federal level.”
Potential ballot initiative gains momentum
Voters may have a chance to weigh in on abortion access directly in November.
Arizona for Abortion Access, which is working to get a constitutional amendment on the state’s ballot enshrining abortion access, attacked Tuesday’s ruling but said it would motivate more people to join their campaign ahead of the state’s July 3 deadline for signatures.
The proposed amendment would amend Arizona’s Constitution to prohibit the state from legislating against abortion up until fetal viability, around 24 weeks into pregnancy, and enshrines other abortion protections into law.
The group said earlier this month that they had gathered more than 500,000 signatures — surpassing the threshold to get an initiative on the Arizona general election ballot.
“This ruling will put the lives of untold Arizonans at risk and robs us of our most basic rights,” Arizona for Abortion Access campaign manager Cheryl Bruce said in a statement. “Implementing a near-total abortion ban from before women even had the right to vote only further demonstrates why we need politicians and judges out of our healthcare decisions. Now more than ever, our campaign is driven to succeed in passing this amendment and protecting access to abortion in Arizona once and for all.”
The president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who opposes abortion, called the decision an “enormous victory for unborn children and their mothers” and indicated abortion opponents in the state will now work to defeat the ballot initiative.
“The compassion of the pro-life movement won in court today, but we must continue to fight,” Dannenfelser said in a statement.
“Governor Hobbs and her pro-abortion allies will pour millions into deceiving the voters about the upcoming amendment that permits abortion on demand when babies can feel pain and survive outside the womb,” she said. We must defeat this extreme measure that would force Arizonans to pay for abortions and eliminate health protections for women.”
Alongside Hobbs, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said she will not prosecute any abortion providers under the law she deemed “draconian.”
ABC News’ Olivia Osteen contributed to this report.
The Arizona Supreme Court has revived an 1864 criminal ban on abortion.
The Civil War-era law, which predated Arizona statehood by almost a half a century, prohibits abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason other than when “necessary” to save the pregnant person’s life. The ban carries a penalty of up to five years in prison for abortion providers.
“[P]hysicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” the court’s opinion read.
The ban — which is set to take effect 14 days after Tuesday’s ruling, on April 23 — will replace Arizona’s 2022 law which banned most abortions after 15 weeks gestation. (That law contained a single exception, for “medical emergencies”; providers who violated it could be charged with a felony and lose their medical licenses.)
The legal case, originally brought in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, sought to determine which ban — 1864 or 2022 — would take precedence after the court struck down federal protections for abortion.
In December 2022, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the 15-week ban. But by that time, Arizona voters had replaced Mark Brnovich, the Republican attorney general who argued for restoring the 1864 ban, with a Democrat, Kris Mayes, who declined to appeal the court’s decision. In a statement Tuesday, Mayes called the court’s decision “unconscionable and an affront to freedom,” and said her office would not enforce the ban.
The case could have ended there, but Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, an anti-abortion OB-GYN from Gilbert, Arizona, who petitioned the court to be appointed as a “guardian ad litem” for the state’s “unborn” children, intervened to appeal the lower court decision. Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative christian litigation shop known for its willingness to take on culture war cases, represented Hazelrigg.
The decision was four to two; all six of the Supreme Court’s justices — four men and two women — were appointed by Republican governors.
The decision could have major electoral consequences: advocates for reproductive rights are working to place a popular referendum on the November ballot that would protect the right to abortion in Arizona. The state is also seen as a critical battleground, one that could decide both the presidential contest and control of the Senate this November.
The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision comes as debate has raged over whether abortion laws should be determined at the state or federal level. Republicans, Including Donald Trump, have had a difficult time addressing the issue this election season, feeling the need to placate the party’s far-right base while not alienating the vast majority of Americans who believe in protecting reproductive rights.
Trump on Monday released a video statement insisting he believes that the issue should be up to the states — but the claim is dubious, to say the least. The former president has repeatedly taken credit for killing Roe v. Wade, and has on several recent occasions spoken about implementing a federal ban.
Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power
Evan Halper – April 6, 2024
Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said the revised forecast for power needs in Georgia showed power use in the state increasing 17 times. New demand, not total demand, is projected to increase 17 times. The article also misspelled the name of the agency that advocates for Maryland ratepayers. It is the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel. The article has been corrected.
Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.
The proliferation of crypto-mining, in which currencies like bitcoin are transacted and minted, is also driving data center growth. It is all putting new pressures on an overtaxed grid – the network of transmission lines and power stations that move electricity around the country. Bottlenecks are mounting, leaving both new generators of energy, particularly clean energy, and large consumers facing growing wait times for hookups.
The situation is sparking battles across the nation over who will pay for new power supplies, with regulators worrying that residential ratepayers could be stuck with the bill for costly upgrades. It also threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy, as utility executives lobby to delay the retirement of fossil fuel plants and bring more online. The power crunch imperils their ability to supply the energy that will be needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.
The nation’s 2,700 data centers sapped more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.
Data center operators are clamoring to hook up to regional electricity grids at the same time the Biden administration’s industrial policy is luring companies to build factories in the United States at a pace not seen in decades. That includes manufacturers of “clean tech,” such as solar panels andelectric car batteries, which are being enticed by lucrative federal incentives. Companies announced plans to build or expand more than 155 factories in this country during the first half of the Biden administration, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a research and development organization. Not since the early 1990s has factory-buildingaccounted for such a large share of U.S. construction spending, according to the group.
Utility projections for the amount of power they will need over the next five years have nearly doubled and are expected to grow,according to a review of regulatory filings by the research firm Grid Strategies.
Chasing power
In the past, companies tried to site their data centers in areas with major internet infrastructure, a large pool of tech talent, and attractive government incentives. But these locations aregetting tapped out.
Communities that had little connection to the computing industry now find themselves in the middle of a land rush, with data center developers flooding their markets with requests for grid hookups. Officials in Columbus, Ohio; Altoona, Iowa; and Fort Wayne, Ind. are being aggressively courted by data center developers. But power supply in some of these second-choice markets is already running low, pushing developers ever farther out, in some cases into cornfields, according to JLL, a commercial real estate firm that serves the tech industry.
Grid Strategies warns in its report that “there are real risks some regions may miss out on economic development opportunities because the grid can’t keep up.”
“Across the board, we are seeing power companies say, ‘We don’t know if we can handle this; we have to audit our system; we’ve never dealt with this kind of influx before,’” said Andy Cvengros, managing director of data center markets at JLL. “Everyone is now chasing power. They are willing to look everywhere for it.”
“We saw a quadrupling of land values in some parts of Columbus, and a tripling in areas of Chicago,” he said. “It’s not about the land. It is about access to power.” Some developers, he said, have had to sell the property they bought at inflated prices at a loss, after utilities became overwhelmed by the rush for grid hookups.
Rethinking incentives
It is all happening at the same time the energy transition is steering large numbers of Americans to rely on the power grid to fuel vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves and all manner of other household appliances that previously ran on fossil fuels. A huge amount of clean energy is also needed to create the green hydrogen championed by the White House, as developers rush to build plants that can produce the powerful zero-emissions fuel, lured by generous federal subsidies.
Planners are increasingly concerned that the grid won’t be green enough or powerful enough to meet these demands.
Already, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina.
In Georgia, the state’s major power company, Georgia Power, stunned regulators when it revealed recently how wildly off its projections were, pointing to data centers as the main culprit.
The demand has Georgia officials rethinking the state’s policy of offering incentives to lure computing operations, which generate few jobs but can boost community budgets through the hefty property taxes they pay. The top leaders of Georgia’s House and Senate, both Republicans, are championing a pause in data center incentives.
Georgia regulators, meanwhile, are exploring how to protect ratepayers while ensuring there is enough power to meet the needs of the state’s most-prized new tenants: clean-technology companies. Factories supplying the electric vehicle and green-energy markets have been rushing to locate in Georgia in large part on promises of cheap, reliable electricity.
When the data center industry began looking for new hubs, “Atlanta was like, ‘Bring it on,’” said Pat Lynch, who leads the Data Center Solutions team at real estate giant CBRE. “Now Georgia Power is warning of limitations. … Utility shortages in the face of these data center demands are happening in almost every market.”
A similar dynamic is playing out in a very different region: the Pacific Northwest. In Oregon, Portland General Electric recently doubled its forecast for new electricity demand over the next five years, citing data centers and “rapid industrial growth” as the drivers.
That power crunch threw a wrench into the plans of Michael Halaburda and Arman Khalili, longtime data center developers whose latest project involves converting a mothballed tile factory in the Portland area. The two were under the impression only a couple of months ago that they would have no problem getting the electricity they needed to run the place. Then the power company alerted them that it would need to do a “line and load study” to assess whether it could supply the facility with 60 megawatts of electricity – roughly the amount needed to power 45,000 homes.
Going off the grid
The Portland project Halaburda and Khalili are developing will now be powered in large part by off-the-grid, high-tech fuel cells that convert natural gas into low-emissions electricity. The technology will be supplemented by whatever power can be secured from the grid. The partners decided that on their next project, in South Texas, they’re not going to take their chances with the grid at all. Instead, they will drill thousands of feet into the ground to draw geothermal energy.
Halaburda sees the growth as good for the country and the economy. “But no one took into consideration where this is all going,” he said. “In the next couple of years, unless there is a real focus on expanding the grid and making it more robust, we are going to see opportunities fall by the wayside because we can’t get power to where it is needed.”
Companies are increasingly turning to such off-the-grid experiments as their frustration with the logjam in the nation’s traditional electricity network mounts. Microsoft and Google are among the firmshoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site, with Microsoft even putting AI to work trying to streamline the burdensome process of getting plants approved. Microsoft has also inked a deal to buy power from a company trying to develop zero-emissions fusion power. But going off the grid brings its own big regulatory and land acquisition challenges. The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United States. Fusion power does not yet exist.
The big tech companies are also exploring ways AI can help make the grid operate more efficiently. And they are developing platforms that during times of peak power demand “can shift compute tasks and their associated energy consumption to the times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid,” according to Google. But meeting both their zero-emissions pledges and their AI innovation ambitions is becoming increasingly complicated as the energy needs of their data centers grow.
“These problems are not going to go away,” said Michael Ortiz, CEO of Layer 9 Data Centers, a U.S. company that is looking to avoid the logjam here by building in Mexico. “Data centers are going to have to become more efficient, and we need to be using more clean sources of efficient energy, like nuclear.”
Officials at Equinix, one of the world’s largest data center companies, said they have been experimenting with fuel cells as backup power, but they remain hopeful they can keep the power grid as their main source of electricity for new projects.
The logjam is already pushing officials overseeing the clean-energy transition at some of the nation’s largest airports to look beyond the grid. The amount of energy they will need to charge fleets of electric rental vehicles and ground maintenance trucks alone is immense. An analysis shows electricity demand doubling by 2030 at both the Denver and Minneapolis airports. By 2040, they will need more than triple the electricity they are using now, according to the study, commissioned by car rental giant Enterprise, Xcel Energy and Jacobs, a consulting firm.
“Utilities are not going to be able to move quickly enough to provide all this capacity,” said Christine Weydig, vice president of transportation at AlphaStruxure, which designs and operates clean-energy projects. “The infrastructure is not there. Different solutions will be needed.” Airports, she said, are looking into dramatically expanding the use of clean-power “microgrids” they can build on-site.
The Biden administration has made easing the grid bottleneck a priority, but it is a politically fraught process, and federal powers are limited. Building the transmission lines and transfer stations needed involves huge land acquisitions, exhaustive environmental reviews and negotiations to determine who should pay what costs.
The process runs through state regulatory agencies, and fights between states over who gets stuck with the bill and where power lines should go routinely sink and delay proposed projects. The amount of new transmission line installed in the United States has dropped sharply since 2013, when 4,000 miles were added. Now, the nation struggles to bring online even 1,000 new miles a year. The slowdown has real consequences not just for companies but for the climate. A group of scientists led by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins warned in a report that by 2030 the United States risks losing out on 80 percent of the potential emission reductions from President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, if the pace of transmission construction does not pick up dramatically now.
While the proliferation of data centers puts more pressure on states to approve new transmission lines, it also complicates the task. Officials in Maryland, for example, are protesting a plan for $5.2 billion in infrastructure that would transmit power to huge data centers in Loudoun County, Va. The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, a government agency that advocates for ratepayers, called grid operator PJM’s plan “fundamentally unfair,” arguing it could leave Maryland utility customers paying for power transmission to data centers that Virginia aggressively courted and is leveraging for a windfall in tax revenue.
Tensions over who gets power from the grid and how it gets to them are only going to intensify as the supply becomes scarcer.
In Texas, a dramatic increase in data centers for crypto mining is touching off a debate over whether they are a costly drain on an overtaxed grid. An analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the energy needed by crypto operations aiming to link to the grid would equal a quarter of the electricity used in the state at peak demand. Unlike data centers operated by big tech companies such as Google and Meta, crypto miners generally don’t build renewable-energy projects with the aim of supplying enough zero-emissions energy to the grid to cover their operations.
The result, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who authored the Wood Mackenzie analysis, is that crypto’s drain on the grid threatens to inhibit the ability of Texas to power other energy-hungry operations that could drive innovation and economic growth, such as factories that produce zero-emissions green hydrogen fuel or industrial charging depots that enable electrification of truck and bus fleets.
But after decades in which power was readily available, regulators and utility executives across the country generally are not empowered to prioritize which projects get connected. It is first come, first served. And the line is growing longer. To answer the call, some states have passed laws to protect crypto mining’s access to huge amounts of power.
“Lawmakers need to think about this,” Hertz-Shargel said of allocating an increasingly limited supply of power. “There is a risk that strategic industries they want in their states are going to have a challenging time setting up in those places.
Solar eclipse triggers onslaught of conspiracy theories across social media
Alex Jones, eclipse paths and power grids — debunking the most popular conspiracy theories ahead of Monday’s eclipse.
Katie Mather, Internet Culture Reporter – April 5, 2024
@holikela via TikTok, Alex Jones via Getty Images, @metacowboy via TikTok (@metacowboy via TikTok, Alex Jones via Getty Images, @holikela via TikTok)
Depending on who you ask, April 8 could go one of two ways. It will either be when a total solar eclipse happens, putting on a show for the roughly 44 million people who live within the eclipse’s path, or it will be the end of the world.
During a total solar eclipse, some places on Earth are entirely shielded from the sun by the moon for a few minutes. In North America, the eclipse will start on the Pacific coast of Mexico and travel a diagonal path northeast across the U.S. before leaving the continent shortly before 4 p.m. ET. The U.S. won’t see another total eclipse for the next 20 years.
“Part of what makes conspiracy theories so compelling is their flexibility and malleability,” Yotam Ophir, an expert on media effects, persuasion and misinformation at the University at Buffalo, told Yahoo News. “Those who understand the world through conspiratorial lenses tend to interpret events, especially dramatic ones, as being driven by intentional, often evil, forces.”
Ophir argues that a large component of why conspiracy theories spread and stick is that they’re based in emotions; conspiracy theorists are usually scared or angry. Jeffrey Blevins, a professor of journalism at the University of Cincinnati, noted that the emotional ties to these beliefs also explain why conspiracy theorists don’t seek out any information that could contradict or negate their existing views.
A sign on I-81 in New York highlights the solar eclipse happening on Monday. (Ted Shaffrey/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
“People want to win an argument, make a point or simply seek validation that their beliefs are right,” Blevins told Yahoo News. “If there’s a pithy meme or some kind of content that they can share on social media that is going to reinforce their belief — they want to share it with others.”
The foundation of conspiracy theories is an “us versus them” mentality, Ophir said.
“Those who share conspiracy theories often feel socially rewarded for doing so — they happen to know something secret that nobody else understands, which makes them special and in the knowing,” he explained.
Let’s break down some of the common conspiracy theories around the April 8 solar eclipse.
No, the Earth is not flat
The Flat Earther mentality believes that the Earth is shaped like a disk and the sun and the moon rotate around each over above the Earth’s surface (the Earth itself does not rotate). It is a pseudoscientific conspiracy theory that does not address the overwhelming scientific evidence that proves the Earth is round.
“If someone believes something to be true (e.g., flat Earth), they are more likely to search out content that supports their preexisting view, rather than any evidence to the contrary,” Blevins explained.
Similar theories have popped up online ahead of April 8.
No, the eclipse is not passing over 8 towns called Nineveh
A popular theory is that the solar eclipse will pass over several towns named Nineveh in the U.S. and Canada. Depending on the post, some have said it’s six towns, others say it’s seven or eight.
People claim it’s notable because Nineveh is also the name of a town that the biblical figure Jonah, a Hebrew prophet, visited, and some double down to suggest that an eclipse happened during the biblical visit too. Thus, some social media users are suggesting this is a sign from God.
“Conspiracy theorists often see the world in Manichean ways, meaning they see the world as composed of purely good people who are in a never-ending war against evil forces,” Ophir said. “These ideas are very Biblical in nature and are strongly embedded in Christianity and other religions.”
In reality, two towns named Nineveh are in the path of totality — one in Ohio and one in Indiana.
No, it is not significant that 2024’s eclipse path will cross over 2017’s eclipse path
A TikTok with over 10 million views suggests that we should be suspicious that April 8’s eclipse path crosses the U.S. in the opposite direction of the 2017 eclipse — making a big “X” over the U.S. The TikToker claims, “This has never happened in the United States. We have never had two solar eclipse paths cross over one town.”
While yes, the paths will cross, it’s not anything more than that. Eclipse paths have and will continue to cross paths frequently because they move in curving arcs across the Earth.
People watch the solar eclipse in August 2017. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters) (REUTERS / Reuters)
No, the eclipse will not cause the collapse of power grids and communication systems across the U.S.
Towns expecting an influx of tourists who want to see the eclipse are expecting cell service disruptions because there will be significantly more people than usual in the area.
The New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) said that state and local government officials have been working with major cell service providers to prepare for the surge in cellular bandwidth that’s expected when tourists visit for the eclipse. DHSES also reiterated that emergency responders use special radio channels and bandwidth to accommodate 911 calls.
Yes, some towns in the eclipse path have declared a state of emergency. No, it’s not because the eclipse is an indication that the world is ending.
States of emergency have been declared in response to the massive crowds that are expected to pour into towns and cities on April 8. Some towns, like Riverside, Ohio, expect the population to double temporarily for the eclipse. States like Ohio haven’t been part of an eclipse path for over 200 years and won’t experience the next one until 2099 — meaning it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event for residents.
“Conspiracy theorists distrust governments and other reliable sources of information,” Ophir said. “They believe that there must be a more nefarious explanation to the emergency preparedness.”
Declaring a state of emergency helps these areas prepare in case of an actual emergency. Plans will be put in place, hospitals will be ready, police and security will be beefed up and methods for any operational communications will already be set up.
