A federal agency is forecasting solar, wind, hydro, and other renewable energy sources will soon—very soon—generate a fourth of U.S. electricity.
Watching the unfolding of our overlapping climate and biodiversity crises is increasingly not for the faint of heart. But it’s easy to overlook good news amid the deluge of the bad. This week the good news was double. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that soon—very soon—renewables will generate a fourth of the nation’s electricity. Dan Gearino at Inside Climate News reports on the EIA’s recently released Short Term Energy Outlook:
...a monthly report whose new edition is the first to include a forecast for 2024. The report’s authors in the Energy Information Administration are expecting renewables to increase in market share, while natural gas and coal would both decrease.
From 2023 to 2024, renewables would rise from 24 percent to 26 percent of U.S. electricity generation; coal’s share would drop from 18 percent to 17 percent; gas would remain the leader but drop from 38 percent to 37 percent; and nuclear would be unchanged at 19 percent.
Progress! Three decades ago, coal generated 52% of U.S. electricity. A decade ago, renewables were still just 13% of the mix. Doubling is definitely good. Plenty of critics said it couldn’t be done.
The other bit of good news is that, for the first time in a single year, $1.1 trillion globally was invested in 2022 in the low-carbon energy transition, according to BloombergNEF, a research firm. It publishes an annual count of how much money businesses, financial institutions, governments and end-users are putting into that transition. BNEF stated:
Almost every sector covered in the report achieved a new record level of investment in 2022, including renewable energy, energy storage, electrified transport, electrified heat, carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen and sustainable materials. Only nuclear power investment did not set a record, staying broadly flat. [...]
Two hurrahs for that. But … Yeah, sorry, there’s a “but.”
BNEF’s data show that China was by far the leading country for attracting energy transition investment, accounting for $546 billion or nearly half of the global total. The US was a distant second at $141 billion, while the EU would have been second if treated as a single bloc, at $180 billion. Germany retained its third place, while the UK dropped one place to fifth as France climbed to fourth. [...]
“Our findings put to bed any debate about how the energy crisis will impact clean energy deployment,” said Albert Cheung, Head of Global Analysis at BloombergNEF. “Rather than slowing down, energy transition investment has surged to a new record as countries and businesses continue to execute on transition plans. Investment in clean energy technologies is on the brink of overtaking fossil fuel investments, and won’t look back. These investments will drive short-term job creation and help to address medium-term energy security objectives. But much more investment is needed to get on track for net zero in the long term.” [...]
Much more investment, indeed. That U.S. figure is so far behind China’s because of myopic Republicans and all-too-many timid Democrats refusing to invest more of the public purse to leverage more private money to speed along the green energy transition. The world’s five top oil companies collectively made $198.7 billion in profit last year yet no windfall profits tax has a ghost of chance of passage. Try to regulate emissions and they and their state attorneys general will go whining to the Supreme Court about statutory overreach by the Environmental Protection Agency. The companies’ marketing agencies get it. From them comes green advertising about XXXoil’s commitment to Mother Earth (oh, see the pretty trees! look at that sparkling refinery!) while plans are made elsewhere in companies’ management to keep drilling into the 22nd Century.
The BNEF put together a Net Zero Scenario for 2050. The researchers estimated that to get to net zero carbon dioxide emissions by then requires an immediate global tripling of green transition investments. When the $274 billion invested in power grids in 2022 is added in, energy transition investment hit $1.38 trillion in 2022. BNEF calculates that the world must invest an annual average of $4.55 trillion through 2030 just to get on a trajectory under its Net Zero Scenario. More than triple last year’s investment.
We have a long way to go just in this one realm of energy transformation even as the challenges of the climate whammy are already pressing upon us all over the planet. Of course, besides the trillions needed for the energy transition, it will take a lot more trillions to mitigate and adapt to the countless impacts of climate change, including a tsunami of migration. In other words, while good news is good and should be duly celebrated, the refrain remains the same: faster, much faster.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
GREEN TAKES
There’s a view among some Republican politicians—like Rep. Garrett Graves of Louisiana and Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas—that there is no such thing as environmental racism. LIke many of their party, data doesn’t move them unless it is more skewed reading from the Heritage Foundation or the Heartland Institute. So, it’s unlikely a new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council will budge them or others of their ilk in Congress to pay attention to fairness in the Biden administration's distribution of $55 billion to improve the nation’s aging water infrastructure.
The study, as María Inés Zamudio at the Center for Public Integrity reports, scrutinized the federal Clean Water State Revolving Fund between 2011 and 2020 and “found communities of color are statistically less likely to receive the money compared to municipalities with larger white populations.”
One example:
While Jackson. Mississippi is the most populous city in the state, this majority-Black community only received federal funds from the “Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund” three times over the last 25 years.
“Make no mistake – this is nothing new.” Our country has a longstanding history of mistreating, and neglecting Black communities, putting the lives of men, women, and children at risk,” Abre’ Conner, NAACP’s director of environmental and climate justice said in a statement.
Study co-Author Becky Hammer said researchers focused on the state revolving fund because the program has been a major source of federal funding for wastewater and stormwater infrastructure projects in the country for decades, and because more money was approved for it in the infrastructure bill.
Researchers found that communities of color often bear the greatest burden of inequitable access to clean water infrastructure and have the most severe need for revolving fund resources. When the population of white people increases by 10%, there’s a small increase in the possibility of receiving funds.
“While the magnitude of this discrepancy is relatively small, it is nonetheless concerning given the importance of distributional equity to the goals of the CWSRF program, and given the range of other barriers—such as disproportionate environmental, socioeconomic, or health burdens—making it more difficult for communities of color to complete infrastructure improvements,” the report said.
Led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the NOWRDC released a report Monday identifying how the United States can develop the strong, equitable domestic supply chain required to achieve the Biden administration’s offshore wind target of 30 gigawatts by 2030. That’s enough to provide electricity to 9-10 million average U.S. homes.
This project is a partnership between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Business Network for Offshore Wind, DNV, the Maryland Energy Administration (MEA), the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and the US Department of Energy (DOE).
“The opportunity to create a resilient and equitable domestic supply chain is one of the most exciting aspects of our offshore wind goals,” said Matt Shields, Senior Offshore Wind Analyst at NREL. “This supply chain would increase our chances of meeting the 30 GW by 2030 target, create a huge number of jobs and economic benefits, and most importantly, position the sector for sustainable growth beyond 2030. This report identifies critical actions that we need to take as an industry to develop the supply chain quickly, but also strategically and equitably.”
This will be no small task, as can be seen in the accompanying chart. As an NREL press release points out, “Achieving these benefits will require a significant ramp-up in domestic manufacturing, ports, vessels, and workforce, all of which are currently too limited to support the needed levels of commercial-scale offshore wind energy deployment.”
GREEN RESOURCES & ACTION
United States Wind Turbine Database. The USWTDB provides the locations of U.S. land-based and offshore wind turbines, corresponding wind project information, and turbine technical specifications. Wind turbine records are collected and compiled from various public and private sources, digitized and position-verified from aerial imagery, and quality checked. The USWTDB is available for download in a variety of tabular and geospatial file formats, to meet a range of user/software needs. Cached and dynamic web services are available for users that wish to access the USWTDB as a Representational State Transfer Services (RESTful) web service.
The Keeling Curve Prize Is Awarding 10 Climate Solutions $50,000—Here's How to Apply. In the early 1950s, Dave Keeling was a postdoc hired to take carbon dioxide measurements in various places to explore whether the gas’s presence in the atmosphere was rising. He invented a device to make the measurements more precise. In 1958, he helped set up the CO2 monitoring station atop Hawai’i’s Mauna Loa volcano. In 1960, he published his paper demonstrating that atmospheric CO2 was rising. The Keeling Curve graphs accumulation of the gas.
Run by the nonprofit Global Warming Mitigation Project, the Keeling Curve Prize has awarded a total of $1,250,000 over the past five years to 50 projects that are all working towards solving the climate crisis. This year, 10 different projects can win a piece of the $500,000 total prize. Two winners will be selected from five different categories of solutions: Carbon Sinks, Energy, Finance, Social and Cultural Pathways, and Transport and Mobility.
To select winners, applications are reviewed by a team of analysts and the prize’s advisory council to determine a group of finalists. A panel of judges then votes among the finalists to make the final awards.
ECOPINION
Michael T. Klare
Climate Change Will Supersede Everything. By Michael T. Klare at TomDispatch. The Pentagon’s Massive Intelligence Failure on China. The Pentagon is required by law to provide Congress and the public with an annual report on “military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China,” or PRC, over the next 20 years. The 2022 version, 196 pages of detailed information published last November 29, focused on its current and future military threat to the United States. In two decades, so we're assured, China’s military—the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA—will be superbly equipped to counter Washington should a conflict arise over Taiwan or navigation rights in the South China Sea. But here's the shocking thing: in those nearly 200 pages of analysis, there wasn't a single word—not one—devoted to China’s role in what will pose the most pressing threat to our security in the years to come: runaway climate change.
Grad Students and Faculty Don’t Want to Work for the Fossil Fuel Industry Anymore. By Bella Kumar at Truthout. The fossil fuel industry has historically reviewed its funded research before allowing it to be published, limiting the autonomy of researchers. For instance, when Harvard researchers found ExxonMobil guilty of misleading the public about climate science, Exxon sent the Vice President of Research and Development to discredit them. In this way, fossil fuel research funding has become an issue of labor. When researchers agree to produce outputs for the university, that is who they are promising to work for, not the funders. Researchers should not be forced or even allowed to produce biased data because of their funders. Student and faculty unions should consider fossil-free research and funding transparency as labor conditions.
The Atlanta Police Shooting Is a Warning Sign for the Safety of Environmental Activists. By Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. The snowballing militarization of police in the United States has coincided with a heightened criminalization of protests. Both efforts share the generous backing of corporate funders. If both phenomena continue to proceed apace, it’s easy to imagine more protesters may soon, like Terán, be hurt or killed. Police killings of environmental defenders are much more common in other countries with major extractive industries, including Brazil, Honduras, and Nigeria: Research released last year from Global Witness found that an environmental defender was killed every two days over the last decade. While Terán’s shooting is the first known police killing of a forest defender in the U.S., a drumbeat of recent bills have increasingly depicted those protesting major development projects as public enemy number one. If the post-9/11 security state has a mantra, it’s that it’s easier to get away with killing someone if you can call them a terrorist. And the South Woods Forest case seems, tragically, to illustrate that principle: Seven of the forest defenders swept up in last week’s raid have now been charged with domestic terrorism, on top of the six Stop Cop City activists charged with domestic terrorism and a host of other felony and misdemeanor charges last month.
Robert Kuttner
Reclaiming U.S. Industry. Biden’s industrial policies represent a stunning ideological reversal. The harder part will be making them work. By Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect. This lengthy analysis provides a good summary and critique of U.S. industrial policy dating back to 1791 and pointing out how foolish it has been to have abandoned industrial policy while other nations have accomplished so much with their policies, at America’s expense. Since the late 1970s, as the U.S. lost productive capacity in industry after industry, progressives have been calling for an industrial policy. This was mostly disdained by orthodox economists and rejected by the presidential wing of both parties in favor of global outsourcing. The economy has paid dearly for this, with the loss of good jobs and industries that anchored entire regional economies. Democrats in turn have paid with the loss of (white) working-class voters. Now, under Joe Biden, we have a potentially transformational shift of ideology and policy. [...] Biden’s administration has sponsored an industrial policy, actually several industrial policies, intended to reclaim technological leadership and domestic manufacturing. Jubilant liberals, who have long called for this, are now a little like the dog who caught the car. Coordinating these diffuse policies into a coherent whole and enabling them to succeed is a staggeringly complex enterprise. Among the challenges are:
- Making sure that different agencies and programs are not operating at cross-purposes and that it all adds up to a coherent whole;
- Engaging the private sector without producing windfall profits, gratuitous subsidies, or failed ventures that become grist for Republican we-told-you-so investigations (viz. Solyndra);
- Putting tough performance standards into these grants and loans to achieve other progressive goals, such as support for union labor and climate justice.
The polycrisis demands poly-solutions. Climate catastrophe: current global governance is not good enough. By Jens Orbeck at The Ecologist. As we face the vast challenge of simultaneously tackling ecological collapse, catastrophic biodiversity loss and accelerating climate breakdown we must recognize a stark truth—our existing global cooperation structures are outdated, inadequate, and simply not good enough to deal with this complex web of interlocking global risks. Overhauling these systems is by no means an easy task—if it were, we would already have seen changes in the way we tackle global threats—but it is a vital step in protecting our future from catastrophic risks.
Save public lands: Put solar on Walmart! Parking lots and big-box store roofs could generate oodles of clean power. By Jonathan Thompson at High Country News. Massive utility-scale solar projects are being built on federal land as part of the drive to 100% clean energy. This puts conservationists and policymakers in the difficult position of having to choose between saving the desert—or the planet. There are other ways, however, and other locations for solar panels, from residential rooftops to farm fields fallowed by drought. France, for instance, recently required large parking lots to be covered by solar canopies that shade cars and provide up to 11 gigawatts of new generating capacity, equivalent to about 10 times the three proposed projects in Arizona. This inspired us to ask: How much power could be generated by slapping solar panels not only over the West’s vast parking lots, but also on its 21,000 big-box store rooftops? We did the math, and this is what we found out.
ECO-QUOTE
“Under communism, prices were not allowed to reflect economic reality. Under capitalism, prices don't reflect ecological reality. In the long run, the capitalist flaw—if uncorrected—may prove to be the more catastrophic.” —Denis Hayes, coordinator of Earth Day 1970, and the first head of the Solar Energy Research Institute, now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Wanted (by scientists): Dead birds and bats, felled by renewables. By Emma Foehringer Merchant at Undark. Most of the bird carcasses that arrive at the Boise, Idaho, lab have been shipped from renewable energy facilities, where hundreds of thousands of winged creatures die each year in collisions with turbine blades and other equipment. Clean energy projects are essential for confronting climate change, said Mark Davis, a conservation biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But he also emphasized the importance of mitigating their effects on wildlife. “I’m supportive of renewable energy developments. I’m also supportive of doing our best to conserve biodiversity. And I think the two things can very much coexist.” To this end, U.S. Geological Service wildlife biologist Todd Katzner, Davis, and other biologists are working with the renewable energy industry to create a nationwide repository of dead birds and bats killed at wind and solar facilities. The bodies hold clues about how the animals lived and died, and could help scientists and project operators understand how to reduce the environmental impact of clean energy installations.
Todd Katzner’s lab manager, Patricia Ortiz, demonstrates how to process samples using a pigeon. Katzner and other biologists are creating a nationwide repository of dead birds and bats killed at renewable energy facilities.
Texas ag agency says climate change threatens state’s food supply. By Jayme Lozano at The Texas Tribune. On the heels of a historic drought that devastated crops from the High Plains to South Texas, a new Texas Department of Agriculture report released January 3 linked climate change with food insecurity and identified it as a potential threat to the state’s food supply. The food access study, coordinated by the TDA and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, notes that “climate instability” is strongly associated with soil loss, water quality, droughts, fires, floods and other environmental disasters. [...] The report also points to other factors that are making it harder for Texans to access and afford food, such as wages falling behind rising costs of living and lack of access to food in rural areas. Another issue is organizations being unaware of others with similar goals; for example, the report notes that certain grocers are interested in expanding delivery services into rural markets, while several food banks have acquired trucks to do the same.
Green Capital Feuds With Local Lenders Over National Climate Bank. By Lee Harris at The American Prospect. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act set aside $27 billion to deploy clean-energy technology in buildings across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency is now deciding how to set up that Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, of which $7 billion will go directly to state, local, and tribal governments. But the spending plan for the remaining $20 billion is up in the air. At issue is how many organizations will have direct access to the money. Some groups say the EPA should direct funding to a multitude of lenders with a track record in poor neighborhoods that struggle to access banking. Another set says the money should flow through a central source: a new national climate bank. “Major sources of capital won’t pay attention to you unless your minimums are in the hundreds of millions or billions,” Reed Hundt, the CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, told the Prospect in an interview. His group plans to ask the EPA for all $20 billion.[...] But in public comments to the EPA, credit union trade groups and community organizations argued that existing local lenders would do a better job creating demand for clean technology in areas that do not have the resources to proactively seek financing for complex rehabilitation projects.
Inuit warn of ‘rock concert-like’ noise from ships affecting Arctic wildlife. Calls for mandatory measures to reduce underwater noise pollution as melting ice opens up shipping routes. By Karen McVeigh at The Guardian. For centuries, narwhals and ringed seals have provided food for Inuit communities on the ice floes of Mittimatalik, or Pond Inlet, on northern Canada’s Baffin Island. But now, the Inuit—who have hunted, trapped and fished in the region since long before the Hudson Bay Company opened its first Arctic trading camp here in 1921—say they no longer find the narwhals where they should be. They say shipping noise is to blame. This week, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, a body representing 180,000 Inuit in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Chukotka in Russia, has urged the U.N. International Maritime Organization to adopt mandatory measures to reduce underwater shipping noise, which they fear is affecting marine mammals.
Narwhals
Sacred Groves: How the Spiritual Connection Helps Protect Nature. From Ethiopia’s highlands to Siberia to the Australian rainforest, there are thousands of sacred forests that have survived thanks to traditional religious and spiritual beliefs. Experts say these places, many now under threat, have ecological importance and must be saved. By Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360. Nobody knows how many sacred natural places there are across the world. They may number in the hundreds of thousands. Almost all societies have them—from Hindu villages in India to Catholic communities in the hills of Italy, and native tribes of the Americas to African animists. The creation and longevity of these places are testament to the power of religion as a tool for community-based conservation. Sacred natural places are “the oldest form of habitat protection in human history,” says Piero Zannini of the University of Bologna, author of a 2021 assessment of their value. “They are becoming ever more important as reservoirs of biodiversity.” In many places they are the only refuges for endangered species and rare ecosystems.
Biden bans logging roads in much of America’s largest national forest. By Marc Heller at E&E News. The Biden administration moved this week toward finalizing its restoration of roadless-area limits on timber and other development in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Under Donald Trump, the roadless restrictions were removed, and Biden had signaled from early on in his term to bring them back. The Department of Agriculture will put 9.3 million acres of the southeast Alaska temperate rain forest off-limits to commercial logging and any development involving the building of roads.The forest totals 16.7 million acres. Said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a news release, “As our nation’s largest national forest and the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, the Tongass National Forest is key to conserving biodiversity and addressing the climate crisis. Restoring roadless protections listens to the voices of Tribal Nations and the people of Southeast Alaska while recognizing the importance of fishing and tourism to the region’s economy.” As expected, timber interests are not displeased, and environmental advocates are full of praise for the move.
A slice of the Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest. It derives its name from the Tongass clan of the Indigenous Tlingit Tribe.
GREEN LINKS
• Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over • California slashed rooftop solar payments. Now opponents want a rehearing • LDS environmentalists want their institution to address the Great Salt Lake’s collapse • Senate Republican conspiracy theorist says Putin is funding “climate crazies” in U.S. • Bay Area Plans to Refine Biofuels Could Derail Climate Goals, Warn Environmentalists • Big Tech Helps Big Oil Spread Subtle Climate Denialism • The New York Trail Designed for Neurodivergent Adventurers • The idea that Black people can write out of a personal relationship to nature and have done so since before this nation’s founding comes to many as a shock • These Chicago Urban Farmers Are Growing Local Food in the Wake of Steel Industry Pollution • Carbon removal efforts not moving fast enough to reach climate goals, study shows
