I am not the biggest fan of irony in politics. But the unanimous opposition of Republicans in the Senate (and soon probably in the House) to the climate- and health-related provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act is another good example of how the GOP harms its own rank-and-file supporters. Indeed, as we have seen time and time again, with few exceptions, congressional Republicans oppose the very concept of serious climate legislation. Much less a bill like the IRA that provides a framework for a national industrial policy of the sort that all the developed nations and some emerging nations have long had in place.
The irony is that an analysis conducted by Bloomberg Opinion and Enersection shows the disconnect between elected Republicans’ rhetoric and votes and where renewable energy technology gets deployed. The bulk of it is in Republican-led congressional districts.
Here’s Liam Denning and Enersection co-founder Jeff Davies:
JD: The big takeaway from me was by all appearances, Republicans continue to vote against their best interest as it relates to where the money will flow. The vast majority of it will flow into Republican districts — that’s what the data shows.
LD: When you actually look at the district level where we are installing utility-scale wind, solar and energy storage — both the stuff that’s already been put in the ground that’s operating and stuff that’s been planned — overwhelmingly red districts dominate:
Mapping Green America
Republican districts, particularly in the Midwest, dominate in terms of U.S. clean technology projects:
While the climate emergency is still, sadly, not that high on most Americans’ priority list, whatever else Democratic challengers include in their campaigns in those red districts, they should spotlight their opponents’ no vote on the IRA and the boons red districts will receive because Democrats voted yes. They could be especially potent against those Republicans who voted against the IRA in Congress but back home in their reelection campaigns tout some piece of it. This spotlighting won’t knock out a big bunch of Republican incumbents. But, combined with the fallout from the demolition of Roe v. Wade and the turmoil from Donald Trump’s legal troubles, it could boost our chances of getting rid of a few of the more vulnerable ones.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
You can read the story behind this video at Jumbo task as Malawi moves 263 elephants to restock a degraded national park.
GREEN shorts
Some selected findings from the non-partisan business leader group’s Clean Jobs America 2022 report based on Department of Energy data:
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3.2 million Americans now work in clean energy, up 5% from a year earlier.
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Every clean energy subsector, from renewables and energy efficiency to electric vehicles and grid modernization, grew last year. Conversely, fossil fuel jobs fell 4%.
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While clean jobs grew along with most of the rest of the economy in 2021, they are still well below their pre-COVID peak, in part because of lingering uncertainty around federal policy.
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California, Texas and New York continue to lead the U.S. in total clean energy jobs. Following (in order) were Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
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Clean vehicles were the big story in 2022. Jobs building electric vehicles grew by a dramatic 26%. Many Republican-led states, including Georgia, Kentucky, Texas and Tennessee, benefited greatly from expansions of EV and other clean transportation manufacturers.
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Small businesses continue to employ the majority of the clean energy workforce. About 90% of all clean energy jobs were at companies that employed fewer than 100 workers.
Total Clean Energy Jobs by State
1) California—505,083; 2) Texas—238,884; 3) New York —160,642; 4) Florida —158,467; 5) Illinois—120,775; 6) Michigan—119,853; 7) Massachusetts—113,409; 8) Ohio—110,272; 9) North Carolina—103,854; 10) Pennsylvania—92,773;
11) Virginia—92,315; 12) Indiana—86,215; 13) Maryland—80,025; 14) Tennessee—77,685;
15) Washington—76,905; 16) Georgia—75,211; 17) Wisconsin—71,370; 18) Colorado—61,179; 19) Arizona—59,383; 20) Minnesota—57,931;
21) Missouri—54,397; 22) Oregon—53,869; 23) New Jersey—53,334; 24) South Carolina—44,011; 25) Utah—43,452; 26) Alabama—41,984; 27) Connecticut—41,458; 28) Kentucky—35,437; 29) Nevada—32,378; 30) Iowa—30,393;
31) Louisiana—28,094; 32) Kansas—23,821; 33) Oklahoma—21,602; 34) Mississippi—20,018; 35) Arkansas—19,965; 36) Nebraska—18,822; 37) New Hampshire—15,915; 38) Vermont—15,668; 39) Rhode Island—14,309; 40) D.C.—14,244;
41) Idaho—13,409; 42) Hawaii—12,873; 43) Maine—12,493; 44) Delaware—12,268; 45) New Mexico—12,014; 46) South Dakota—11,860; 47) Montana—9,898; 48) West Virginia—9,540; 49) North Dakota—8,614; 50) Wyoming—8,226; 51) Alaska—5,006
SHORTer SHORTS
• Want to know where the nearest wind turbines to you are? Here’s the U.S. Geological Survey’s interactive map of its Wind Turbine Database.
• Since 2009, there have been more than 300 deaths related to land conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon, many of the victims being Indigenous. Just 14 of those killings, or 5%, were brought to court. President Jair Bolsonaro’s weakening of environmental agencies and anti-Indigenous rhetoric and actions have created a sense of impunity, emboldening criminals in the Amazon to retaliate against activists and environmentalists who expose their illicit activities, experts say.
• Electric vehicles, on average, generate less carbon pollution than comparable gasoline-fueled cars. How much less depends on where they’re charged. But as the U.S. electric grid grows greener by shifting from coal and gas to solar and wind, the benefits of EVs will grow too. If you’ve already got an EV or are thinking of buying or leasing one, this Union of Concerned Scientists’ interactive gadget can help you determine how much global warming pollution your choice of EV is responsible for. Enter your ZIP code, make, model, and year to find out.
ECO-TWEET
(It took me a moment to decide if this was real.)
ECOPINION
The Senate's dark, inexcusable history of obstructing climate progress by Ryan Cooper at MSNBC. The Inflation Reduction Act's climate spending is somewhat smaller than the climate package that previously passed the House, and it contains substantial fossil fuel benefits as a sop to Sen. Joe Manchin, who also cut out virtually all of Biden’s proposed welfare state expansions. The act is roughly 90% smaller than the initial Build Back Better. More importantly, twice before in the past 30 years, the Senate has garroted a president’s climate policy. The climate today is in parlous shape in large part because the Senate makes it almost impossible to govern this country. The American climate has developed all manner of emergencies while the Senate was swatting down green policies.
The most awe-inspiring and exuberant birds are facing extinction first—let’s stop nature becoming boring by Lucy Jones at The Guardian. This latest research illustrates what the often hard-to-imagine biodiversity crisis looks like: a less resplendent, less vibrant world. It is heartbreaking, yes, but galvanizing, and an opportunity for focus and pressure on those in power. The vast majority of us don’t want to live in a world bereft of toucans and puffins. Or a boring world, or a dying world. So would politicians care to mention how they square the myopic focus on “growth” with a burnt-out, used-up Earth that is clearly telling us to stop? If we wipe out the species with the most unique traits, and continue to destroy the rich diversity of the Earth, we will all be impoverished in ways we can’t yet comprehend. Even if we never see a toucan in the wild, we are still their kin. Their wildness is still, in some way, part of us. We are still animals among animals.
Oil and Gas’s Pivot to Blue Hydrogen Is Falling Through by Justin Mikulka at The Intercept. A major argument against transitioning fully off fossil fuels and toward clean energy like green hydrogen — a clean form of hydrogen made with renewable energy — has been that we can’t afford it. But the market logic is now changing, due to the rapidly falling costs of producing renewable energy, which is 75 percent of the cost of making green hydrogen. At the same time, the cost of producing green hydrogen is also falling quickly, while natural gas prices have risen around the globe. This has resulted in a situation no one predicted: In Europe, green hydrogen is now cheaper than liquefied natural gas. And oil and gas companies, in turn, are increasingly investing in green hydrogen instead of using methane to produce blue hydrogen.
8 Billion Humans? Population Is a Difficult Conversation, but We Need to Start Getting Real by Carter Dillard at the Independent Media Institute. July 11 was World Population Day, an observance established by the United Nations aiming to highlight population issues, particularly how the human population relates to the environment. [...] “We must celebrate a world of 8 billion people,” writes Dr. Bannet Ndyanabangi, the East and Southern Africa regional director for the U.N. Population Fund, the U.N. agency tasked with improving reproductive and maternal health. Others are picking up that upbeat messaging. The truth is that growth is undoing the progress we made in our response to the climate crisis. Also, our near-universal family planning systems have been based on a lie—that having kids is more personal for the parents than interpersonal for the future child, our communities, and our planet—a lie that maintains the generational privilege of the wealthy, and promotes unsustainable growth over birth entitlements that would have ensured all kids were born in conditions that comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Interview with John Raymond about his novel of the future: Denial, conducted by Ayesha Rascoe at NPR Illinois. Excerpt:
RASCOE: The thing about Denial is it's not exactly this dystopian future. It's not like Mad Max, right?
RAYMOND: Precisely.
RASCOE: And it's not like Star Trek, where everything's been solved. It's somewhere in between. Like, did you feel like this middle ground is more realistic, and that's the route you chose to go?
RAYMOND: Yeah. I mean, part of my desire to write this too is a — kind of an ongoing argument I think I've been having with the dystopian post-apocalyptic genre. The number of ways I've seen the Earth annihilated in popular culture at this point is, like, uncountable. You know, I mean, I've seen it destroyed by aliens, I've seen it destroyed by zombies, I've seen people rapture it, I've seen pandemics. And at a certain point, the genre held some sort of cautionary moral energy, you know? Like, be careful of your choices, be careful of your consumer society. But I feel like, as the decades have gone on, it just starts to feel really morbid and, like, a kind of death wish almost - humanity just in some obsessive repetition, compulsion, imagining a future that is not necessarily preordained.
ECO-QUOTE
“Action moves public opinion and what the media covers, and moves the realm of what’s politically possible. The normal systems have failed. It’s time for every person to realize that we need to take this on.”—Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of the civil disobedience-oriented Climate Emergency Fund, which is underwritten by Aileen Getty, granddaughter of the Getty Oil founder. More on CEF here.
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Sea life may downsize with ocean warming — bringing challenging impacts by Elizabeth Devitt at Mongabay. A new model predicts that marine microbes could shrink by up to 30% in the future due to climate change, affecting bigger organisms that eat them, including fish, potentially disrupting the food chain from the bottom up. This shrinking effect, should it occur, could have wide repercussions: reduced food mass at the bottom of the food chain would affect fisheries, leaving less food for people, as well as mean less carbon sequestered in the sea, potentially making climate change worse. Scientists say the ability to accurately predict these impacts could improve management of ocean resources. But researchers don’t agree on exactly why this sea life shrinkage is happening, and say a variety of factors may need to be considered to make accurate forecasts.
Nuclear power plants are struggling to stay cool by Gregory Barber at Wired. Climate change is reducing output and raising safety concerns at nuclear facilities. Of all the low-carbon energy sources that will likely be necessary to fight climate change, nuclear power is usually thought of as the least perturbable. It’s the reinforcement that’s called in when the weather doesn’t cooperate for other zero-carbon energy sources, like wind and solar. But the nuclear industry faces its own climate risks. Problems with water—too much of it or too little—are more commonly associated with hydroelectric dams, which have struggled to maintain output in drying places like the American West. But as the Swedish historian Per Högselius puts it, much of present-day nuclear engineering is not about splitting atoms, but about managing larger-scale aquatic concerns. Nuclear technicians are known to refer to their craft as a very complicated way of boiling water, producing steam that spins turbines. But much more is usually required to keep the reactor cool. That’s why so many facilities are located by the sea and along big rivers like the Rhône.
UK Department for Transport, Common Misconceptions About Electric Vehicles. While this pamphlet includes some UK-specific issues, it does a good—and succinct—job of answering questions that are often raised regarding EVs by people just beginning to educate themselves on the subject. For instance, there’s this: “3. Building an EV generates more greenhouse gas emissions than it saves. Reality: This has been debunked in numerous well-respected studies. A new battery-electric car has just a third of the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions of an equivalent new petrol car, even when taking into account battery production and disposal. EVs are getting progressively cleaner as electricity generation decarbonizes.”
From Farmland to Frac Sand. In the Midwest, fertile soil is being excavated in pursuit of fossil fuels, while communities suffer. By Lisa Held at Civil Eats. One Monday in June, excavators were tearing into a field in Wedron, Illinois, where the nubs of last season’s dried corn stalks were still sticking out of the ground. Behind where the crew worked, strips of earth had been carved out like steps on a wide staircase descending to the bottom of a deep pit. On the far side, fine sand the color of snow was piled in front of soaring, solid walls of sandstone. Picture standing on a ledge looking down into the biggest rock quarry you’ve ever seen. Then, enlarge that image 100 times, whitewash it, and add turquoise blue pools of wastewater. This is silica mining. Fracking, a process used to extract natural gas and petroleum, depends on silica sand, or “frac sand” to produce the fossil fuels. A single fracking site can use millions of pounds of sand. The sand is blasted into wells to keep fissures in the rock open so that oil and gas can be released. In the Midwest, farmland is being irreversibly lost in pursuit of silica sand.
The War Over Public Water in Pennsylvania by Hadas Thier at The Nation. Residents are uniting across political lines to battle corporations attempting to privatize their water systems. The town of Towamencin, Pa., is not known for being a hotbed of activism. Sitting 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia, it is a mostly middle-class, white commuter community of 18,000 that has long skewed Republican. But this past April, as the township’s governing board of supervisors prepared to sell Towamencin’s wastewater facility to a private water company, hundreds of residents packed town hall meetings in an effort to stop the sale, the culmination of a year-long campaign by a newly formed group called Neighbors Opposing Privatization Efforts (NOPE).
Chile’s ‘Climate Change Constitution’ Provides Hope For A Nation Home To Mega-Drought And Privatized Water by Anna Abraham at Currently. After nationwide protests against social inequality and privatization in 2019, Chileans voted for the dictatorship-era Constitution to be rewritten in the following year, and for it to be carried out by a democratically elected Constitutional Assembly. The new Constitution was finalized on July 4 this year. It includes a host of reforms aimed at addressing the water issue and climate change. Citizens will vote on the Constitution on Sept. 4. “The new Constitution is a door of hope for new generations,” said Josefina Correa, former Political Director of Greenpeace Andino. “If we need to safeguard the future of the country in the next 20-30 years, it is important that we recover the public control over water. The new Constitution allows the reassignment of water, prioritizing consumption for humans.”
Green BITS
• Study of 10,196 species found that 21.1% of reptiles are at risk of extinction • Coal mining destroyed Appalachia's mountaintops. Then came the floodwaters • Mountaintop Mining Is Destroying More Land for Less Coal, Study Finds • Are oil companies actually taking steps to cut emissions overall or are their claims mostly just “greenwashing”? • A Community of Resistance—Three women reflect on eight years of fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline • The Inflation Reduction Act promises thousands of new oil leases. Drillers might not want them. • Poll: More than half of Republican voters in 3 states unwilling to spend on climate change solutions • New Heat Pumps For Old Apartments • Q&A: Inside Climate News’ Marianne Lavelle on the long road to climate action • Meet the Group That’s Been Bringing Bison Back to Tribal Lands for 30 Years