Greenland hit with ‘unusually extensive’ melting of ice sheet, boosting sea levels, scientists say
Saleen Martin – July 24,2022
It’s getting hotter in Greenland, and last weekend temperatures rose enough to cause 18 billion tons of the country’s ice sheet to melt over three days.
Scientists have warned about the fate of Greenland’s ice sheet and say what happened between July 15 and 17 is the latest massive melting event contributing to an increase in the global sea level.
The amount of water from the melt – about 6 billion tons a day, or 18 billion tons over the weekend – is enough to “cover West Virginia in a foot of water – 4 inches per day, roughly,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado’s Earth Science and Observation Center and National Snow and Ice Data Center, told USA TODAY.
Video: Sightseers capture huge chunk of Norway glacier crumbling into sea
Sightseers capture huge chunk of Norway glacier crumbling into sea
During a tour in Spitsbergen, Norway, sightseers captured a portion of the Monaco glacier breaking off and crumbling into the sea.
Much of the melting came from northern Greenland because warm air drifted over from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Scambos said.
There is also a high-pressure dome over Greenland. Together, they created an “unusually extensive melt event,” he said.
A July 2022 photo of melting summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland.
Temps heating up in Greenland
Temperatures vary over Greenland, but the coldest temperatures are in areas of high elevation, toward the center of the ice sheet, said William Lipscomb, a senior scientist in the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory.
Once temperatures are above freezing or 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the melting begins. Temperatures last weekend were around 60 degrees, or 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, according to CNN.
“In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of heat waves in Greenland, this recent warming of it being one example,” Lipscomb told USA TODAY. “Any temperature above freezing can cause some surface melting.”
Greenland loses ‘tremendous amount of ice every year now’
In the 1980s and 1990s in Greenland, a melt event of this sort never occurred, but starting in the 2000s – especially since 2010 – the melting has been more extensive.
The melt is two times larger than normal, said Xavier Fettweis of the University of Liège. Fettweis, a polar researcher, created a model scientists use, along with satellite data, to study Greenland’s changes.
The melt is among two of the largest melts in the ice sheet history after the 2012 and 2019 melting events; in 2019, the runoff was about 527 billion tons. So far, the total melt is far below 2019 levels, but the situation is more dire over the Svalbard ice caps at the North of Norway, Fettweis said.
More melting was expected, said Scambos, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “This event is one of many events over the whole summer,” he said. “We can expect on the order of 100 billion tons of water going into the ocean. Greenland as a whole is losing a tremendous amount of ice every year now.”
A July 2022 photo of melting summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ice scientist Nathan Kurtz was recently in Greenland to help better calibrate ICESat-2, one of the agency’s satellites used to monitor Greenland.
Its data has shown a loss of ice from Greenland of about 200 billion tons a year over the past two decades, Kurtz told USA TODAY. “This loss of ice contributes directly to global sea level rise, which has significant societal impacts,” he said.
Lipscomb, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said scientists measure the amount of water melted in units of gigatons per year, or 1 billion tons of water. Before climate change, about 600 gigatons of snowfall were coming in each year and about 300 gigatons were going out in the form of summer melting.
Now, Greenland’s ice sheet is losing nearly 300 gigatons of water each year more than it gains from snowfall, Lipscomb said. “There’s still time to avoid catastrophic sea level rise, but every year that greenhouse gas emissions continue at the present rate increases the chances of serious problems down the road.”
In some parts of the world such as Asia, seasonal water supply depend on the timing of the glacier melt.
“If the melt is happening too early, you may not be getting the water when you need it for farming,” he said. “And if the glaciers completely melt, then you won’t have the glacier melt water source at all. And that’s something people worry about for later this century as the warming continues.”
Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY’s NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757 – and loves all things horror, witches, Christmas, and food.
U.S. swelters in latest heat wave, with Texas and Oklahoma hitting 115°F
David Knowles, Senior Editor – July 20, 2022
The latest extreme heat wave to hit the United States is showing no mercy, leaving more than 105 million Americans in 28 states under heat advisories and excessive heat warnings from the National Weather Service.
Temperatures of 115 degrees Fahrenheit have been recorded in Texas and Oklahoma this week, and more than 211 million people across the country will experience heat of 90 degrees or higher on Wednesday.
In a year when record-breaking heat waves have become commonplace, scientific research has shown that climate change is behind the uptick in their frequency and duration.
“While each heat wave itself is different, and has individual dynamics behind it, the probability of these events is a direct consequence of the warming planet,” Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist for the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, told ABC News.
Residents of Texas, a state that has been subjected to daily triple-digit temperatures and is in the midst of a mega-drought affecting much of the West, have for weeks been asked to conserve water and electricity.
As in much of Europe, where local officials have urged residents to avoid unnecessary travel as a heat wave there has buckled roadways, airport runways and rail lines, people in several U.S. states have retreated inside air-conditioned spaces.
“When it’s 110 outside, you’re a prisoner in your home,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told the Washington Post. “Is this the kind of life you want to live?”
Like Texas, Oklahoma has been particularly hard hit by the heat, with every one of the state’s 120 weather monitoring stations recording temperatures of 102°F or higher on Tuesday.
Coupled with high humidity, the high temperatures pose a serious risk to human health. The human body sweats in order to cool off, but when humidity is high and there is too much moisture in the atmosphere, that sweat cannot evaporate and results in even higher internal temperatures.
Over the last several days in Spain and Portugal, where temperatures have reached near 110°F, more than 1,700 people have died due to heat-related causes.
Officials in Phoenix are worried that the city will once again break heat-death records this year, especially among the vulnerable homeless population.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we are in worse shape from a heat-associated-death standpoint than we were last year because there are so many more unsheltered folks that are at 200 to 300 times the risk of heat-associated death,” David Hondula, director of the city’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, told Yahoo News.
While climate change skeptics often argue that excessive heat is simply a normal seasonal consequence, scientists have established that the burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution is responsible for rising temperatures.
Of course, that would be exactly what you would expect if, as has been proved, global temperatures are rising. In states sweltering in triple-digit heat, meanwhile, the reality of climate change is playing out in real time.
“It looks like we’re going to stay in the range of highs of 100 to 105 degrees for the next week and a half,” Erin Maxwell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Norman, told the Oklahoman. “But in terms of real relief from the heat, that doesn’t look to be on the horizon any time soon.”
London wakes up to the grim realities of heat wave hell
CBS News – July 20, 2022
London — Some European nations were still battling their worst wildfires in decades Wednesday as the U.K. woke up to relief after its hottest day on record. As CBS News correspondent Ramy Inocencio reports, flames have torn through tinder dry brush in an area covering thousands of miles from Greece to Portugal.
The widespread heat wave that fueled those flames stretched all the way up to Scotland on Tuesday, delivering record-high temperatures in towns and cities across Britain and leaving Londoners shocked to see their town hit by the same kind of bushfires they’ve grown accustomed to watching on the news.
Charred ground and gutted homes in the British capital were testament to the fact that even the stereotypically damp and dreary U.K., where umbrellas and overcoats are more commonplace than air-conditioners, cannot escape the consequences of a rapidly warming climate.
Houses destroyed in a major fire in Wennington, Greater London, England, are seen on July 20, 2022. Fires broke out across London amid record-breaking heat the previous day. / Credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty
Rare wildfires burned and billowed across London on Tuesday as much of England endured 100-plus-degree heat. A new temperature record was set in the town of Coningsby, in eastern England, at 40.3 Celsius, which is over 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
As much of the country has gone a month or more with barely a drop of rain, the scorching temperatures were all it took to ignite matchstick-dry grass and brush in back yards and along highways.
The London Fire Brigade worked its busiest day since World War II, with firefighters responding to more than 2,600 calls and fighting 12 fires simultaneously at one point, according to Mayor Sadiq Khan.
At least 41 properties were destroyed by the fires in London, the mayor said, and 16 firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation or other injuries.
Dee Ncube and her family fled their burning neighborhood in the capital, leaving everything behind. She told Inocencio the only time she’d seen anything like it was in movies or on TV.
“We’ve got nothing, everything’s gone,” Timothy Stock, whose home was among those lost to the flames in the village of Wennington, in Greater London, told CBS News partner network BBC News.
Government cabinet minister Kit Malthouse told other members of Britain’s parliament on Wednesday that 13 people died amid the heat wave after “getting into difficulty in rivers, reservoirs and lakes while swimming in recent days — seven of them teenage boys.”
But while many Londoners were shocked by the extreme heat, people who study the Earth’s changing climate were not.
“This is it, right? This is the climate change that we’ve been promised by scientists,” Dr. Michal Nachmany, a climate policy expert at the London School of Economics, told CBS News. “This level of extreme weather is life threatening, and we really want to make sure that people are not under any illusion that this is serious, and this is here to stay.”
Climate campaigners were also keen to stress Tuesday’s extremes as a warning of danger ahead, and a call to action.
Demonstrators from a protest group called “Just Stop Oil” climbed onto metal framework for signs over the M25, one of Britain’s busiest highways, which encircles London, causing a long traffic backup Wednesday morning.
The group said it was sorry about the disruption for morning commuters, but it declared the M25 “a site of civil resistance,” and warned there would be more protests in the coming days. “This is the moment when climate inaction is truly revealed in all its murderous glory for everyone to see: as an elite-driven death project that will extinguish all life if we let it,” the group said in a statement, announcing its action and demand that the U.K. government stop investing in fossil fuel extraction.
Other countries further south were still battling major blazes on Wednesday that erupted last week. Thousands have died and tens of thousands have been evacuated.
Firefighters in southwest France were still battling twin blazes that cover ground twice the size of Paris for a ninth straight day on Wednesday, but weather conditions improved there overnight, too, and officials said they were gaining control.
“Our assessment is generally positive. The situation improved overnight,” local fire service spokesman Arnaud Mendousse told reporters, according to The Associated Press. President Emmanuel Macron was set to visit the hard-hit Gironde region on Wednesday, where the fires have driven about 37,000 people from their homes. Spain and Portugal were still recording new deaths from the extreme heat and fires, with the toll already well over 1,000.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Wednesday that “more than 500 people died because of such high temperatures” over the last week or so in his country, citing a statistical analysis by a public health institute.
“I ask citizens to exercise extreme caution,” said Sanchez, adding that the “climate emergency is a reality.”
A wildfire burns near a house in Ntrafi, Athens, Greece, July 19, 2022. / Credit: COSTAS BALTAS/REUTERS
Further west, police in Greece ran door to door, shouting at residents to flee just north of Athens as a fire approached.
Evacuations continued in Italy, also, where fires were still growing and temperatures haven’t yet started to ease.
While the worst of the heat wave appeared to be over for much of Western Europe, with temperatures dropping dramatically overnight from the north of Britain to the south of France, climate experts and campaigners were desperate to get the point across that while this week has been an exception, these exceptions are expected to become more common — and get even hotter.
Kevin Trenberth, Scholar, NCAR; Univ. of Auckland – July 19, 2022
This direct air capture plant in Iceland was designed to capture 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Climeworks 2021 via AP Photos
When politicians talk about reaching “net zero” emissions, they’re often counting on trees or technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air. What they don’t mention is just how much these proposals or geoengineering would cost to allow the world to continue burning fossil fuels.
There are many proposals for removing carbon dioxide, but most make differences only at the edges, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to increase relentlessly, even through the pandemic.
I’ve been working on climate change for over four decades. Let’s take a minute to come to grips with some of the rhetoric around climate change and clear the air, so to speak.
When fossil fuels are burned for energy or used in transportation, they release carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas that is the main cause of global heating. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries. As more carbon dioxide is added, its increasing concentration acts like a blanket, trapping energy near Earth’s surface that would otherwise escape into space.
When the amount of energy arriving from the Sun exceeds the amount of energy radiating back into space, the climate heats up. Some of that energy increases temperatures, and some increases evaporation and fuels storms and rains.
Because of these changes in atmospheric composition, the planet has warmed by an estimated 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 F) since about 1880 and is well on the way to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which was highlighted as a goal not to be crossed if possible by the Paris Agreement. With the global heating and gradual increases in temperature have come increases in all kinds of weather and climate extremes, from flooding to drought and heat waves, that cause huge damage, disruption and loss of life.
Currently, the main source of carbon dioxide is China. But accumulated emissions matter most, and the United States leads, closely followed by Europe, China and others.
Estimated shares of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2018 compared with cumulative emissions over time, based on data released by BP. Kevin Trenberth, Author provided
What works to slow climate change?
Modern society needs energy, but it does not have to be from fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, this changeover to renewables has been slow, due in large part to the the huge and expensive infrastructure related to fossil fuels, along with the vast amount of dollars that can buy influence with politicians.
Geoengineering often means “solar radiation management,” which aims to emulate a volcano and add particulates to the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation back to space and produce a cooling. It might partially work, but it could have concerning side effects.
The global warming problem is not sunshine, but rather that infrared radiation emitted from Earth is being trapped by greenhouse gases. Between the incoming solar and outgoing radiation is the whole weather and climate system and the hydrological cycle. Sudden changes in these particles or poor distribution could have dramatic effects.
The last major volcanic eruption, of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, sent enough sulfur dioxide and particulates into the stratosphere that it produced modest cooling, but it also caused a loss of precipitation over land. It cooled the land more than the ocean so that monsoon rains moved offshore, and longer term it slowed the water cycle.
Carbon capture and storage has been researched and tried for well over a decade but has sizable costs. Only about a dozen industrial plants in the U.S. currently capture their carbon emissions, and most of it is used to enhance drilling for oil.
Direct air capture – technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air – is being developed in several places. It uses a lot of energy, though, and while that could potentially be dealt with by using renewable energy, it’s still energy intensive.
Planting trees is often embraced as a solution for offsetting corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Trees and vegetation take up carbon dioxide though photosynthesis and produce wood and other plant material. It’s relatively cheap.
But trees aren’t permanent. Leaves, twigs and dead trees decay. Forests burn. Recent studies show that the risks to trees from stress, wildfires, drought and insects as temperatures rise will also be larger than expected.
How much does all this cost?
Scientists have been measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958 and elsewhere. The average annual increase in carbon dioxide concentration has accelerated, from about 1 part per million by volume per year in the 1960s to 1.5 in the 1990s, to 2.5 in recent years since 2010.
This relentless increase, through the pandemic and in spite of efforts in many countries to cut emissions, shows how enormous the problem is.
Carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The monthly mean, in red, rises and falls with the growing seasons. The black line is adjusted for the average seasonal cycle. Kevin Trenberth, based on NOAA data, CC BY-ND
Usually carbon removal is discussed in terms of mass, measured in megatons – millions of metric tons – of carbon dioxide per year, not in parts per million of volume. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.5×10¹⁵ metric tons, but as carbon dioxide (molecular weight 42) is heavier than air (molecular weight about 29), 1 part per million by volume of carbon dioxide is about 7.8 billion metric tons.
According to the World Resources Institute, the range of costs for direct air capture vary between US$250 and $600 per metric ton of carbon dioxide removed today, depending on the technology, energy source and scale of deployment. Even if costs fell to $100 per metric ton, the cost of reducing the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 1 part per million is around $780 billion.
Tree restoration on one-third to two-thirds of suitable acres is estimated to be able to remove about 7.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050 without displacing agricultural land, by WRI’s calculations. That would be more than any other pathway. This might sound like a lot, but 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide is 7 billion metric tons, and so this is less than 1 part per million by volume. The cost is estimated to be up to $50 per metric ton. So even with trees, the cost to remove 1 part per million by volume could be as much as $390 billion.
So for hundreds of billions of dollars, the best prospect with these strategies is a tiny dent of 1 part per million by volume in the carbon dioxide concentration.
This arithmetic highlights the tremendous need to cut emissions. There is no viable workaround.
Kevin Trenberth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
For Europe, a climate change reckoning arrives early
David Knowles, Senior Editor – July 18, 2022
In what has already been a brutal summer of heat waves across much of Europe, temperature records are expected to be broken in parts of the U.K., Germany and France this week, putting thousands of lives in danger.
Temperatures are expected to reach as high as 109°F on Tuesday in locations where air conditioning is not a common amenity, and health officials are warning that excess deaths due to heat are all but guaranteed. With temperatures forecast to be 15°F to 30°F above normal, the U.K. Met Office issued a first-ever extreme heat warning, and scorching conditions could drag on for weeks.
With the extreme heat that scientists have shown is linked to climate change, wildfires have erupted on the continent. In a pine forest left parched due the rapid evaporation caused by high temperatures, nearly 1,700 firefighters in France have been battling an enormous blaze near Bordeaux.
“The situation is critical, mainly because the weather is unfavorable to us,” Vincent Ferrier, a French official, told reporters Monday.
A church is pictured during sunset as a heat wave hits Europe, in Oisy-le-Verger, France, on July 14. (Pascal Rossignol/Reuters)
Wildfires, made more frequent due to rising global temperatures, have also erupted in Spain and Portugal, forcing thousands from their homes. As shocking as the effects of climate change have been to witness in recent years, scientists continue to warn that they will worsen as long as humans continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
In fact, Europe has already exceeded the 1.5°C threshold for catastrophic climate change set forth by the IPCC, having warmed by 2.2°C since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Flames rise at a forest fire near Louchats in southwestern France on Monday. (Philippe Lopez/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
“Every fraction of a degree counts. Greenhouse gas concentrations are at record levels. Extreme weather and climate disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said of the report.
Indeed, the speed at which climate change is unfolding has caught some experts by surprise. In 2020, for instance, the Met Office produced a hypothetical map of what summertime heat wave temperatures might look like in 2050. That reality, however, was nearly matched this week.
As has been documented over the past several years, the climate change dangers now facing Europe includeextreme heat waves, drought, wildfires and inundating rainfall. Last year, more than 150 people died when torrential downpours resulted in flash flooding in parts of Germany and Belgium, and a record-breaking heat wave in Greece helped fuel a wildfire that destroyed homes and businesses. Europe’s hottest day on record was recorded in Sicily last August, when the mercury hit 119.8°F.
These individual events are part of a larger pattern and a consequence of a warning planet. A mountain of research has shown that it is by no means limited to Europe or the United States.
At a time when Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., all but torpedoed President Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions in half by 2030 when he announced Friday he would not vote to pass a budget reconciliation bill that included measures intended to tackle climate change, the problem of rising temperatures is taken seriously across the political spectrum in Europe.
Yet while leaders there have pledged ambitious goals for reducing the emissions causing climate change, they will need the help of nations like the U.S., China and India in order to make a significant impact on the heat waves that continue to make life miserable on the continent.
Touring the scene of one of the many wildfires currently ravaging Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summed up the dire situation.
“Climate change kills,” he said Monday. “It kills people, it kills our ecosystems and biodiversity.”
European Heat Wave Kills Hundreds, Threatens Tourism Revival
Barbie Latza Nadeau – July 16, 2022
Jon Nazca/Reuters
Extreme temperatures and devastating droughts across Europe are quickly turning what was supposed to finally be a return to normalcy for the region’s tourist entities into an inferno.
More than 360 people have died in Spain since July 10 in an historic heat wave that has seen temperatures hover around 115 degrees for several days in a row. At least 84 of the deaths have occurred in the last 72 hours, prompting the Spanish government to urge people to limit exposure to the heat and ban some tourist activities like guided walks in Barcelona during the midday hours.
At the Madrid Zoo, several cold-water reptiles have perished, and zookeepers are giving popsicles to many creatures that are refusing to eat due to the extreme conditions that are not expected to let up before the end of the month. Spain already endured an early summer heat wave with 829 people dying between June 11 and 20. Temperatures this time around are expected to be at least two degrees higher.
Susana Vera/Reuters
In Portugal, more than 235 people have died this month from heat-related causes, and temperatures have continued to climb. Wildfires across the regions have led to the evacuation of several tourist camping and outdoor recreational areas that were booked for the entire summer, sending the travel industry into chaos, according to the government.
The Italian government has called a national emergency along the River Po, which cuts across northern Italy and is so low people can walk across it at certain points. The drought has also led to extreme water restrictions, including turning off ornamental fountains in Milan and restricting hair dressers from double shampooing clients to save water. In southern Italy, droughts have sparked wildfires, including several devastating blazes within Rome’s city limits in the last two weeks.
Isabel Infantes/Reuters
In the U.K., where summers are often disappointingly gray and air conditioning is rare, people were told to avoid alcohol and stay inside over the weekend as temps there are set to top 104 degrees. The Met Office issued a red warning for London, Manchester and York until Tuesday, warning that Britons “are not adapted to what is coming.”
The never-before-used weather red alert signals a danger to life or risk of serious illness to the general population due to extreme heat. “Population-wide adverse health effects are likely to be experienced, not limited to those most vulnerable to extreme heat, leading to potential serious illness or danger to life,” the Met Office said in a statement Saturday.“Significantly more people are likely to visit coastal areas, lakes and rivers leading to increased risk of water safety incidents.”
Fires are also raging across the South of France and Greek islands, complicating travel and isolating some of the region’s beloved summer getaway spots.
National weather agencies across the affected region warn that it may be another week before temperatures start to return to normal.
In a Twist, Old Coal Plants Help Deliver Renewable Power. Here’s How.
Elena Shao – July 15, 2022
Silos of ash and other waste at the Brayton Point Power Station, a retired coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Mass., on July 7, 2022. (Simon Simard/The New York Times)
Across the country, aging and defunct coal-burning power plants are getting new lives as solar, battery and other renewable energy projects, partly because they have a decades-old feature that has become increasingly valuable: They are already wired into the power grid.
The miles of high-tension wires and towers often needed to connect power plants to customers far and wide can be costly, time-consuming and controversial to build from scratch. So solar and other projects are avoiding regulatory hassles and potentially speeding up the transition to renewable energy by plugging into the unused connections left behind as coal becomes uneconomical to keep burning.
In Illinois alone, at least nine coal-burning plants are on track to become solar farms and battery storage facilities in the next three years. Similar projects are taking shape in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Maryland. In Massachusetts and New Jersey, two retired coal plants along the coast are being repurposed to connect offshore wind turbines to the regional electrical grids.
“A silver lining of having had all of these dirty power plants is that now we have fairly robust transmission lines in those places,” said Jack Darin, director of the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group. “That’s a huge asset.”
Over the past two decades, more than 600 coal-burning generators totaling about 85 gigawatts of generating capacity have retired, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Individual power plants can have more than one generator.) A majority of the 266 remaining coal-burning power plants in the country were built in the 1970s and 1980s and are nearing the end of their approximately 50-year operational lifetime.
Most of that retired capacity will not be replaced with coal, as the industry gets squeezed out by cheaper renewable energy and tougher emissions regulations. At the same time, renewable energy producers are facing obstacles getting their projects connected to the grid. Building new power lines is costly and controversial, as neighbors often oppose transmission lines that can disturb scenic vistas or potentially reduce property values nearby. In addition, getting power line projects approved by regulators can be time-consuming.
Building and operating renewable energy projects has long been cheaper than fossil fuel plants. The barrier “is not economics anymore,” said Joseph Rand, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which conducts research on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy. “The hardest part is securing the interconnection and transmission access.”
This makes old coal plants an attractive option as sites for renewable energy projects. Not only are the old plants already wired into the transmission system, they also have substations, which help convert electricity to a supply that is suitable for use in homes and businesses.
That was a key factor in choosing Brayton Point Power Station as a grid connection point for a 1,200-megawatt wind farm 37 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, said Michael Brown, CEO of the offshore wind developer Mayflower Wind.
At 1,600 megawatts, the coal-fired plant was the largest one in New England when it retired in 2017. The facility itself, located in the waterfront town of Somerset, will be replaced by an undersea-cable factory owned by the Italian company Prysmian Group. And the offshore wind project will connect to the grid at the Brayton Point interconnection point, making use of the existing substation there.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, Vistra Corp., a Texas-based power generation company that also owns a variety of power plants in California and Illinois, said it would spend $550 million to turn at least nine of its coal-burning facilities in Illinois into sites for solar panels and battery storage.
The largest, a plant in Baldwin, Illinois, that is set to retire by 2025, will get 190,000 solar panels on 500 acres of land. Together, the panels will generate 68 megawatts of power, enough to supply somewhere between 13,600 and 34,000 homes, depending on the time of year. It will also get a battery that can store up to 9 megawatts, which will help distribute electricity when demand peaks or the sun is not shining.
Vistra CEO Curtis Morgan said it became clear that the power company would need to “leave coal behind,” and it was eager to build new zero-emissions projects to replace some of the power from those plants. However, he said, the slow process of getting approval from grid operators, which coordinate and monitor electricity supplies, has been a roadblock for a number of Vistra’s proposed projects.
A surge in proposals for wind, solar and battery storage projects has overwhelmed regulators in recent years, according to an analysis from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which overlooks the University of California’s Berkeley campus. In 2021, wait times had almost doubled from a decade before, to nearly four years, and that does not include the increasing number of projects that are withdrawing from the process entirely.
If every project currently waiting for approval gets built, “we could hit 80% clean energy by 2030,” said Rand, the lead author of the report. “But we’d be lucky if even a quarter of what’s proposed actually gets completed.”
Three of Vistra’s battery storage projects in Illinois — at the Havana, Joppa and Edwards coal plants — also benefited from an infusion of grants from a state law, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, aimed at supporting a “just transition” for coal-dependent communities toward renewable energy. It was signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last fall and also required all fossil-fuel-burning plants to cut their emissions to zero by 2045, which could lead to their closure, though most of the coal plants in Illinois were already poised to shut down within a decade.
The Coal-to-Solar Energy Storage Grant Program that emerged from the legislation also supports two other battery projects, owned by NRG Energy, which will be built at the Waukegan and Will County coal-burning power stations.
The advantage of building renewable energy projects on old coal plants is twofold, said Sylvia Garcia, director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which oversees the coal-to-solar program. First, projects benefit from the ease of reusing an existing connection to the grid. Second, it is an effort toward “trying to reinvest in the communities that have lost those coal plants” in the first place, she said.
While the new projects will temporarily create construction jobs, operating a solar plant or battery facility usually does not require as many employees. The Baldwin plant previously employed around 105 full-time workers. And while Vistra has not yet finalized numbers on a site-by-site basis, the nine Illinois projects combined will create 29 full-time jobs annually, the company’s communications director, Meranda Cohn, said in an email.
Coal plants also typically sit on a sizable parcel of land, and redeveloping those sites into renewable energy projects is a way to put something productive on a piece of property that might otherwise go unused.
“It’s really shifting a very negative resource into one that is more positive for the community,” said Jeff Bishop, CEO of Key Capture Energy, which plans to locate a 20-megawatt battery storage project at a retired coal plant near Baltimore.
Elsewhere in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the retirement of Mount Tom Station, a coal plant that had operated for more than five decades, presented a number of possibilities, said Julie Vitek, vice president of government and regulatory affairs for the power producer ENGIE North America. After meetings with government officials, environmental groups and residents, a solar farm emerged as the best way to “give new life to the industrial land at Mount Tom,” she said.
Today, the property is home to some 17,000 solar panels and a small battery installation that form a community solar project managed by Holyoke Gas & Electric, a city-owned utility that gives customers the choice to opt in to receiving solar power from the project. The panels produce about 6 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1,800 homes.
It is not only solar, battery and wind developers that are eyeing old coal plants for their infrastructure. TerraPower, a nuclear power venture founded by Bill Gates, is locating a 345-megawatt advanced nuclear reactor adjacent to a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The location will not only allow the reactor to take advantage of the existing grid connection but also to make use of the coal plant’s cooling system, said Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s president and CEO.
“In a way, it’d be a real shame not to make use of those coal plants,” Levesque said.
‘Things Are Going to Break’: Texas Power Plants Are Running Nonstop
Will Wade, Mark Chediak and Naureen Malik – July 15, 2022
(Bloomberg) — As searing Texas heat drives power demand to record highs, the state’s grid operator is ordering plants to run at a historic pace, often forcing them to put off maintenance to keep cranking out electricity. That’s helped keep the lights on, for now, but the short-term focus is putting even more stress on a system that’s already stretched near the limit.
Twice in the past week, officials have called on Texans to limit electricity use during scorching afternoons as demand inched perilously close to overwhelming supply. Now, there are growing concerns over how long power plants can maintain the grueling pace as they run nonstop, according to Michele Richmond, executive director of Texas Competitive Power Advocates, a generator industry group.
“Things are going to break,” she said. “We have an aging fleet that’s being run harder than it’s ever been run.”
Also See: Texas Confident Stressed Grid Will Hold Up Amid Summer Heat
To meet the surge in power demand, Ercot, the grid operator, is leaning heavily on a mechanism called reliability unit commitments to ensure there’s enough supply. Plants are being regularly ordered to go into service, or remain in operation, and skip any scheduled maintenance. The measure also overrides shutdowns for economic factors or any other issues. And Ercot is using the rule more than ever before as the state battles bout after bout of extreme weather.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, as the operator is formally known, called for 2,890 hours of RUCs system-wide in the first half of this year. That’s more than triple the 801 hours in the first half of 2021, according to data from Ercot’s independent market monitor provided by Richmond. For all of 2020, there were 224 RUC hours.
The problem is that deferring repairs now will likely come back to haunt power-plant owners, Richmond said.
“If you put off preventative maintenance because it’s needed for reliability, it increases the chances you’ll need a more comprehensive outage” later on as plants start to malfunction, she said.
Growing Population, Crypto
The situation underscores that the Texas grid is relying on short-term solutions for what’s poised to be a long-term problem. The state is contending with a population boom that’s driven demand higher. Crypto mining has also taken off in the past year, bringing with it the industry’s power-intensive operations. Meanwhile climate change has made extreme weather events that drive up electricity use more likely to occur and more severe — creating situations like a deadly February 2021 freeze that caused blackouts across the state.
Brad Jones, Ercot’s interim chief executive officer, is aware he’s walking a fine line. On one hand, there have been six times in the past year that using RUCs have enabled the operator to avoid declaring grid emergencies. Or as Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, said at a June 22 hearing: Six times when the grid otherwise would’ve been “on the brink of rolling blackouts.”
However, Jones says he knows that forcing plants to stay in service is raising the risk of breakdowns. For example, a key concern at this time of year is boiler-tube leaks, especially at older plants. These leaks don’t always mean a plant must shut down immediately, but if they’re not closely monitored they can lead to bigger, more costly repairs.
“Typically, a generator can run for a while with the water leaking,” Jones said in an interview. “The question is, how long is that.”
The grid operator is in constant contact with generators and works to give them time to make needed repairs when conditions allow, Jones said. Ultimately, the state needs more power plants, and regulators are working on ways to make that happen, he said.
Ercot and other operators are facing dual challenges, said Michael Webber, an energy-resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Most companies schedule maintenance during the spring and fall, when the weather is mild and power use is typically lower.
But climate change means these windows of temperate weather are getting shorter. This year, for instance, an early May heat wave forced some generators to skip tune-ups. And periods of high heat are also lasting longer, putting more stress on power plants that are running all-out for weeks at a time.
Maintenance for power plants — especially older ones — can be time consuming and complicated, said Webber, who also serves as chief technology officer of Energy Impact Partners, a clean tech venture fund
“You kind of have to dismantle the plant,” he said. “It’s not something you can do in a couple of hours.”
All of this is exacerbated by the state’s aging fleet. The average age of coal-powered plants in Texas is about 50 years, and natural-gas plants average about 30 years.
“It’s kind of like humans — we need to rest and recover,” Webber said. “If we run full speed for a long time, we can collapse.”
They sounded alarms about a coming Colorado River crisis. But warnings went unheeded
Ian James – July 15, 2022
A boat juts from the shoreline of Lake Mead, exposed as the water has receded to the lowest levels since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The Colorado River is approaching a breaking point, its reservoirs depleted and Western states under pressure to drastically cut water use.
It’s a crisis that scientists have long warned was coming. Years before the current shortage, scientists repeatedly alerted public officials who manage water supplies that the chronic overuse of the river combined with the effects of climate change would likely drain the Colorado’s reservoirs to dangerously low levels.
But these warnings by various researchers — though discussed and considered by water managers — went largely unheeded.
Now, many of the scientists’ dire predictions are coming to pass, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell nearly three-fourths empty and their water levels continuing to fall. Some researchers say the seven states that depend on the river would have been better prepared had they acted years ago.
“If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that humans are really reluctant to give things up to prevent a catastrophe,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “They’re willing to hang on to the very end and risk a calamity.”
The Colorado River, vital to seven states, as seen from the Toroweap Overlook on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
He said it’s just like humanity’s lack of progress in addressing climate change despite decades of warnings by scientists.
If larger cuts in water use were made sooner, Udall said, the necessary reductions could have been phased in and would have been much easier.
Peter Gleick, a water and climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said the collective failure to heed scientists’ repeated warnings is “directly responsible for how bad conditions are today.”
“If we had cut water use in the Colorado River over the last two decades to what we now understand to be the actual levels of water availability, there would be more water in the reservoirs today,” Gleick said. “The crisis wouldn’t be nearly as bad.”
In a 1993 study for the federal government, Gleick and coauthor Linda Nash examined the threat climate change posed for the river and warned that the water supply would be very sensitive to rising temperatures.
“Under conditions of long-term flow reductions and current operating rules, these reservoirs are drawn almost completely dry,” they wrote. “Current approaches to water management in the basin will have to be modified.”
Whitewater rafters ride the Colorado River, as seen from Toroweap Overlook on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
In 2000, board members of the Metropolitan Water District who were concerned about climate change invited scientists including Gleick to speak at a workshop. The scientists advised them to start preparing for consequences including less Sierra snow and possible decades of drought.
Gleick said a common refrain from many water managers in the 1980s and ’90s, when told about risks based on climate projections, was to respond that once they had a more definitive picture of effects on water resources, they could deal with it.
Even later, as the projections got more definitive and “alarm bells got louder,” Gleick said, political barriers hindered changes in the entrenched system of how the river’s water is divided and managed, a system established starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Action was stymied, he said, by those “who either didn’t want to believe the science or had something to lose if we changed our policies.”
Gleick said there is a parallel in how fossil fuel interests have long fought the sorts of changes necessary to address global warming.
In the Colorado River Basin, Gleick said, the vested interests that have hindered new approaches for dealing with the water shortfall include some in agriculture who benefit from generations-old water rights, water managers with a “find more and more water” mentality, and politicians who’ve fought to defend old state apportionments.
In the 2000s, as drought ravaged the watershed, a growing body of scientific research showed that higher temperatures would substantially shrink the flow of the river, which supplies farmlands and cities from the Rocky Mountains to Southern California and northern Mexico.
“If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that humans are really reluctant to give things up to prevent a catastrophe.”
Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist
In a 2004 study, scientists at the University of Washington projected major declines in runoff and river flow with warmer temperatures.
In other research in 2007, scientists Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid wrote that climate simulations showed an an increase in drought severity would occur “in lockstep” with global warming, projecting a 25% reduction in flow from 2006 to 2030, and a 45% decrease by midcentury.
When federal officials released a report in 2007 on new river management rules, their estimates of future risks were rosier, showing minimal odds of reservoirs reaching low levels. The report cited studies predicting declines in river flow with climate change, saying that while those projections “are of great interest, additional research is both needed and warranted to quantify the uncertainty of these estimates.”
The Colorado River flows over rocks along its banks at Lees Ferry, a narrow stretch that marks the divide between the river’s upper and lower basins. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
In a 2008 study, scientists Tim Barnett and David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote that if climate models were correct, the Colorado River would “continue to lose water in the future,” with its flow likely declining 10% to 30% over the next 30 to 50 years. Those estimates turned out to match, if conservatively, the 20% decline in flow that has occurred since 2000.
Barnett and Pierce estimated that if current allocations stayed the same, there was a 50% chance the usable water supply in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two largest reservoirs, would be gone by 2021. They titled their study “When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?”
They said that annually the region was taking out about 1 million acre-feet of water more than the river was providing, which they warned was “simply not sustainable.” Barnett and Pierce wrote that time was short to decide how to use a reduced water supply, and the alternative would be a “major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest.”
Discussing the research, Barnett said: “You have to wonder if the civilization we’ve built in the desert Southwest is sustainable in the future.”
The scientists’ findings, however, were discounted at the time by some water managers. Terry Fulp, regional director for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, said he disagreed with the study’s assumption that climate models were sensitive or refined enough to project regional effects, and the agency’s own studies didn’t project such severe declines.
Some Southern California water officials said people shouldn’t panic over the report, pointing to ongoing water-saving efforts and the past winter’s above-average snowpack. Roger Patterson, an assistant manager of the Metropolitan Water District, was quoted as saying that back-to-back winters like that could largely refill the reservoirs.
In another study in 2009, Barnett and Pierce found that if human-caused climate change continued to make the Southwest drier as projected, the reduced river flow would mean significant shortages. Pierce said shortfalls could be avoided “if the river’s users agree on a way to reduce their average water use.”
But that didn’t happen, at least not on the scale the researchers said was necessary.
Visitors climb rock formations near the Colorado River at Lees Ferry. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
“The scientists have been raising the warning flag for quite a while now,” said Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society.
Pitt said for years she and other conservationists urged water managers to look more at the climate models. And although officials gradually incorporated more climate science in their projections, she said, the institutions that manage the river clearly didn’t embrace the red flags soon enough.
A 2012 study by the Bureau of Reclamation discussed estimates of reduced water supplies due to climate change, but Pitt said the severity of the projections was muted in the report’s summary.
Even as the reservoirs dropped, she said, there were other reasons why representatives of states and water districts resisted change.
“Each state and each water user has an inclination to fight to defend their access to water,” Pitt said, and this drive has weighed against “the need to defend the reliability of the entire system.”
The Colorado River has long been overallocated, with so much water diverted that its delta in Mexico dried up decades ago, leaving only small remnants of its once-vast wetlands.
Boaters cross the Arizona-California border on the Colorado River near Needles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
In studies during the last decade, scientists have homed in on what climate models indicate about the river’s future, finding that roughly half the decline in flow has been due to warmer temperatures; that climate change is driving the “aridification” of the Southwest; that warming could take away more than one-fourth of the average flow by 2050; and that for each additional 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the river’s flow is likely to decrease about 9%.
As the West endured more hot and dry years, the few wet winters failed to produce the sort of rebound that water managers had hoped for. As water kept flowing to growing cities and farmlands producing hay, lettuce and other crops, the reservoirs continued to drop.
But with Lake Mead and Lake Powell now just 27% full and declining toward new lows, the federal government has stepped in and ordered the seven states to come up with plans to cut water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet, the equivalent of roughly 15% to 30% of total annual diversions in the U.S. and Mexico.
Even long before scientists began studying the effects of rising temperatures on the river, various people raised concerns that there wouldn’t be sufficient water — among them John Wesley Powell, leader of the historic 1869 expedition through the Grand Canyon; scientist Eugene Clyde LaRue, whose warnings about insufficient water went unheeded during negotiations that led to the 1922 Colorado River Compact; and the writer Wallace Stegner, who warned in 1985 that the West was growing “beyond our limits” and that “There is just not enough water.”
Visitors to Hoover Dam can see where severe and prolonged drought conditions have exposed the rocky sides of Black Canyon and the intake towers that feed the dam’s power generators. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Some environmental activists have pointed out that in 1954 California water lawyer Northcutt Ely testified in Congress to oppose the construction of Glen Canyon Dam and another proposed dam, saying they were unnecessary, would lead to more losses from evaporation and increase the “overdraft” of the water supply.
John Weisheit, co-founder of the group Living Rivers, said Ely’s overarching goal was watershed sustainability. The concerns Ely raised nearly seven decades ago, he said, have only been compounded by climate change.
Weisheit recalled telling federal officials at a public meeting in 2005 that the reservoirs were going to go empty, “and they laughed at me.”
Weisheit said water managers knew how bad the situation was years ago but have failed to rein in water demands to match the limited supply.
Udall said he has been frustrated that federal agencies continue to use 30 years as a baseline “climate normal,” because data from the late 20th century, which was cooler and wetter, “blinds us to the period we’re in right now.”
Federal officials have been using what they call “stress test” hydrology in their projections in recent years, leaving out earlier 20th century records while considering data going back to 1988. But Udall said this approach has continued to yield some projections that are too rosy, an issue that he said government specialists appear to be working to address.
Valley of the Gods is a scenic sandstone valley in southeastern Utah near the San Juan River, a major tributary of the Colorado River. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Udall said he has looked over charts showing the reservoirs’ declines over the last 23 years and has wondered at what point “should we have been smarter?” That point, he said, was about a decade ago.
“We’re out of time,” he said. The solutions now will have to be “harsh and drastic.”
Looking back at the 2019 deal, the years of negotiations culminated in an agreement that reflected what was politically possible at the time, said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
“No one was willing to take bigger cuts then,” Entsminger said.
Entsminger said that in 2014, when he started leading the agency, he and his staff were focused on climate projections and the risks of low reservoir levels. That was why, in addition to prioritizing conservation, the agency spent $522 million building a new low-level pumping plant and intake at Lake Mead, which would allow Las Vegas to keep accessing water if the reservoir dropped to “dead pool,” a level at which water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam.
In 2015, when the water authority endorsed the project, Entsminger said he and others hoped they would never have to turn on the pumping plant. But they switched it on this year, and now Las Vegas is relying on the deeper intake.
Entsminger said many water managers who came before him had seen full reservoirs in the 1980s and operated under the assumption that a couple of snowy winters could bring a rebound. In hindsight, he said, “clearly, we should have had bigger cuts sooner.”
Now every water supplier needs to consider how to use less, he said.
“This is a tragedy of the commons situation,” he said. “If we don’t all pitch in and make corrections, Lake Mead and Lake Powell could get to dead pool.”
U.S. cannot fulfill climate change pledges if Manchin won’t vote for clean energy, experts say
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – July 15, 2022
If Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., will not vote for a budget reconciliation bill that includes the measures to reduce climate change in the version passed by the House of Representatives last year — as the Washington Post reported Thursday night that he would not — it virtually guarantees that the United States will fail to meet its international commitments to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, experts say.
As part of his efforts to galvanize a strong global agreement to avert catastrophic climate change by staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) in Glasgow, Scotland, last year, President Biden pledged that the U.S. would reduce by at least half its emissions from a 2005 baseline by 2030. Due to the energy sector’s reduction in coal use, the nation is already almost halfway to that goal, with emissions having dropped by about one-fifth since 2005. But getting the rest of the way there is impossible without legislation that hastens the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, according to modeling by economists, scientists and policy wonks.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin with Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, both of West Virginia. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
“This appears to be the final installment in the collapse of Democratic hopes for a major legislative package on climate for the 117th Congress,” Barry Rabe, a professor of environmental policy and public policy at the University of Michigan, told Yahoo News in an email about Manchin’s reported stance. “Despite bold initial promises, Congress has once again failed to deliver on a climate bill. This clearly imperils any prospects to honor President Biden’s emission reduction pledge and further challenges American credibility in global climate deliberations.”
On Thursday, the Rhodium Group, a research and data analytics firm specializing in energy and the environment, issued a study showing that the U.S. is on pace to reduce emissions 24% to 35% below 2005 levels by 2030. Absent significant new policies, in other words, the best-case scenario is that the U.S. gets 70% of the way towards Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half, and it is just as likely to get halfway to the goal.
Manchin had previously signaled support for provisions in the budget bill, formerly known as Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, that would subsidize the deployment of clean energy and electric vehicles. Democrats wanted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years on tax credits for purchases such as rooftop solar panels, electric cars and tax credits on incentives for projects such as advanced battery storage and cleaning up industrial processes. Congressional Democrats and Biden had already agreed to drop other climate provisions, such as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have provided incentives for electric utilities that switched to clean energy sources such as wind and solar power, at Manchin’s request.
Solar panels on a rooftop in Los Angeles. (Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)
Previous studies by organizations such as the World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading global environmental think tank, had found that the U.S. could meet Biden’s emissions target, just barely, with the package of climate provisions Manchin had indicated he could support, possibly in exchange for approval of more fossil fuel infrastructure projects.
“Failure to enact a climate-smart budget package would be a devastating setback to achieving the United States’ pledge to cut emissions in half by 2030,” said Dan Lashof, director of WRI United States, in a statement on Friday. “Research shows that strong financial investments, like those under consideration in the budget reconciliation package, are essential for the U.S. to achieve that timeline.”
But on Thursday evening the Washington Post reported that Manchin had told Democratic leaders he would not vote for a bill that includes spending on climate change or tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations to pay for it. “Senator Manchin believes it’s time for leaders to put political agendas aside, reevaluate and adjust to the economic realities the country faces to avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire,” said Manchin’s spokesperson Sam Runyon.
On Friday morning, the West Virginia Democrat told a local radio station in his home state that he is open to backing the climate change policies if inflation eases next month. “I said, ‘Chuck, can we just wait until the inflation figures come out in July … and then make a decision what we can do and how much we can do?’” Manchin said, referring to a conversation he had with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “[Schumer] took that as a no, I guess, and came out with this big thing last night. And I don’t know why they did that. I guess to try to put pressure on me, but they’ve been doing that for over a year now. It doesn’t make any sense at all. As far as I’m concerned, I want climate, I want an energy policy.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images)
If Manchin doesn’t provide his crucial vote, however, and Republicans gain control of at least one chamber of Congress in November’s midterm elections, there is no hope for legislation to address climate change. And without legislation, the federal government has limited tools at its disposal to reduce emissions. Only Congress can tax and spend. And contrary to Manchin’s reasoning about inflation, a 2021 study by the Rhodium Group found that American households would save an average of about $500 per year on energy bills if the climate package were passed.
“We need to make it more affordable for everyday Americans to get off of fossil fuels,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist who specializes in environmental policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Yahoo News. “Fossil fuels are expensive, they are driving inflation. The bill would have been really great for everyday Americans’ pocketbooks. It would have helped them close the gaps, so that they could afford an electric vehicle, so that they could afford an electric heat pump. There were all these investments that were going to make it easier for utilities to build wind and solar, that were going to make it easier to retire dirty, expensive fossil fuel plants. It really was about helping to invest in climate solutions, so that we can move at a faster pace.”
Using executive authority under existing laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency can require stronger pollution controls and the Department of Interior can restrict fossil fuel development on federal land, but those moves — assuming they survive the inevitable legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry — will only reduce emissions at the margins.
President Biden speaking in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Wednesday. (Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“One of the tragedies of the past 18 months is that the Biden administration has been wary of upsetting these delicate negotiations with Senator Manchin and so they have held back on using the full force of their executive authority,” Stokes said. “That’s not the case going forward, the Biden administration will be acting. It will be much more aggressive on everything from Clean Air Act regulations to limiting fossil fuel development. There’s no reason to delay anymore. So we could be in a slightly better place, if and when the Biden administration kicks into high gear on climate change.
“But getting to the goal is difficult,” she added. “And there is modeling that has estimated what does it mean if the Biden administration uses all the regulations it can and it tends to be, it gets us like five percentage points closer to the goal. So if we’re at 35%, it gets us to 40%, optimistically.”
“We are not currently on track to meeting our international climate commitments or our environmental justice commitments,” Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group, told Yahoo News. “A major investment was necessary over the next decade to supercharge our transition to clean energy and bring down the cost of wind and solar and ramp up renewable energy production. Without that major investment, it’s hard to see how we meet our commitments.”
