We’re told that seeing the average global temperature reach 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average for a day, a week, a month, or even a year doesn’t mean that Earth has permanently passed a line that scientists say means big climate trouble. Because temperatures rise and fall from natural variability, averages are measured in decades.
The Sixth Assessment released early last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report concluded that there would be a 50% chance the 1.5° line would be crossed permanently sometime in the mid-2030s. But late last year, a study published in the peer-reviewed Nature Climate News put the possibility of a permanent breach as early as 2029. Then came the news this past January that 2023 had been the hottest year scientists had ever observed, with the average global temperature warmer than the pre-industrial era by 1.54°C (2.77°F).
So far, it’s looking like 2024 could take that hottest-year-ever title away. We are now finishing out what seems likely to be the 14th consecutive month of unprecedentedly high temperatures. The first four days of last week were the four hottest in the historical record, Monday coming in hottest. The previous daily records came last year in July and before that in August 2016. There was a difference, however. Both last year and eight years ago the warming of the El Niño climate pattern boosted temperatures. However, this round of El Niño, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, ended in April, but there’s been no relief yet. We’re on the cusp of hitting temperatures equal to those of 125,000 years ago when Earth was a very different place.
Many scientific uncertainties remain regarding the trajectory and timing of the impacts of the climate crisis. Scientists have just recently learned that relatively warm sea water is eating deep into the innards of the Antarctic’s so-called “doom glacier.” Others are reporting grim news about climate-induced animal migrations or dwindling populations. For many people the litany of already occurring impacts, not to mention future impacts, has generated a psychic numbing. They don’t want to hear about it, they think there’s nothing they can do about it, or still, in many instances, they just don’t believe it. They fail to understand climate change will affect everything. Not just heat waves and sea level rise. Mental health, recreation, work, travel, child rearing, nutrition. The list is colossal.
How much of climate change impacts are now “baked in” and will happen no matter what humans do to ameliorate or mitigate them can only be guessed at. It depends on too many variables.
One of those is what political leaders will themselves do and what they will do to enable other people to do. In that regard, we’ve been especially fortunate in the past nearly four years to have had President Joe Biden in office. At Canary Media, Jeff St. John and Dan McCarthy wrote a tribute to Biden the day after he announced he was no longer running for reelection:
No other U.S. president has accomplished as much to shift federal policy in support of cutting greenhouse gas emissions — and Biden has done so in a way that is bringing the production of key clean energy technologies to the U.S. and revitalizing the country’s struggling manufacturing sector.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in a party-line vote in 2022, is the most important climate legislation in U.S. history, directing what could add up to more than $1 trillion in federal tax credits and tens of billions of dollars of grants and incentives to manufacture and deploy everything from solar and wind power to industrial decarbonization technologies. [...]
This law alone has delivered swift and staggering results. More than $100 billion of private investment has been committed to building U.S.-based factories that make everything from solar panels to EV batteries. Over 90,000 jobs have been created in the process, most in Republican-led states. Clean energy installations have surged to record highs. Power sector emissions are showing signs of decline. [...]
In addition, the Biden administration has married social justice with its clean energy and infrastructure policies through its Justice40 Initiative, which requires that at least 40 percent of the benefits from these federal clean energy investments go to disadvantaged communities overburdened by pollution. Tens of billions of dollars are flowing to these communities to make solar panels more affordable, improve energy efficiency, and remediate the environmental harms of industrial and fossil fuel pollution.
In addition, under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency has tightened restrictions on methane emissions from oil and gas operations, imposed a rule to slash emissions from power plants by the mid-2030s, and set stronger vehicle emissions standards. The administration has set limits on how much new drilling can occur on public land.
All those gains are under threat not just from Donald Trump, but from most of the Republican Party, and not just its fringier denizens. The GOP 2024 Platform doesn’t contain the word climate even once. The Extreme Supremes have already put into play pieces of Project 2025, undermining a successful regulatory regime of decades, with more wrecking to come. With Trump back in office, the damage he did to international cooperation on climate last time would be far surpassed.
There are still many gaps in U.S. climate policies. Like dealing with the fact that the U.S. now produces more oil and natural gas than any country in history ever, along with the emissions that burning those fuels dumps into the atmosphere. Curbing the demand for that production is a complex political, economic, and practical problem. That faucet cannot be instantly shut off, but neither can it be allowed to keep running full blast. As U.N. Chief António Guterres says, rich countries are “signing away our future” with rampant fossil fuel development.
What path Kamala Harris as president may take to deal with that faucet can only be speculative at this point. There’s plenty in her previous actions and statements to bring hope to climate hawks, her support for the Green New Deal being high on the list. But what she actually achieves in office on this front will obviously depend on what the Senate and House look like come January, and what new precedent-killers the Supreme Court will decide going forward.
What we do know from those four hottest days, those 13 hottest months, and that relentless breaching of the 1.5° mark, is that if we don’t greatly accelerate everything being done to address the climate crisis, it won’t be long before we breach 2.0° and beyond.
weekly ECO-VIDEO
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ECO-QUOTE
“The continental United States loses a football field’s worth ofnatural areas every 30 seconds due to human activity. This lossof nature—accelerated by climate change—is a threat to thenation’s health and prosperity, affecting communities’ clean air,water, and defenses against severe weather, floods and wildfires.”— Tom Udall, former U.S. senator and now ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa
ECOPINION
Vice President Kamala Harris
Biden’s Election Exit and the New Nominee Could Have Profound Impacts for the Climate, Experts Say by Kiley Price at Inside Climate News. I’m fresh out of crystal balls to predict what will happen come November, but experts say Harris’ climate record offers clues to her future moves if elected. As attorney general of California, she investigated and in some cases filed claims against companies—from Volkswagen to ConocoPhillips—for environmental violations such as their contributions to climate-warming pollution. Later, as California senator, Harris was one of the original co-sponsors of the Green New Deal. The progressive—but eventually failed—resolution aimed to help the country rapidly wean off fossil fuels. E&E News’ Brian Dabbs and Heather Richards walked through Harris’s energy record in depth, if you’d like to learn more. During her presidential run in 2020, she pushed for more aggressive steps on climate than Biden, calling for a $10 trillion increase in funding on climate action over 10 years, as well as a ban on fracking. Though Harris hasn’t yet laid out her campaign’s entire environmental policy platform, her climate advisor, Ike Irby, told The New York Times that she would focus on implementing the IRA.
Is Kamala Harris ‘The Climate President We’ve Been Waiting For’? by Damien Newton at Streetsblog. For those who might have forgotten, Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General of California in November of 2010 and served for six years, from January of 2011 until she began her term as Senator from California in 2017. And her office had some high profile wins in court that caused national reverberations on climate policy. These included an $86 million settlement with Volkswagen when it was caught using software that lied about its vehicles’ emissions, and a civil lawsuit against gas station operators Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips for environmental violations that netted the state an $11.5 million settlement. She also led a criminal investigation of All American Pipeline for causing an oil spill in Santa Barbara in 2015, and the company was convicted on nine criminal charges. While these are all impressive successes initiated by her office, they were also easy wins from a public relations perspective. Going after car companies, oil companies, and gas station operators was going to be popular in California even if she didn’t win her Senate election. But the action her office took when it inserted itself into the planning process for the San Diego region in 2012 was a big risk — and it is a cause for optimism about a potential Harris presidency.
A Test for Harris: How to Talk About the Green New Deal by Lisa Friedman at The New York Times. As a senator in 2019, Ms. Harris cosponsored the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution that was centered around the idea that addressing climate change required significant changes in the economy. It called for converting the electric grid to 100 percent clean energy this decade, declared clean air, clean water and healthy food to be basic human rights. But it also endorsed free health care and affordable housing for all Americans. “Climate change is real, and it poses an existential threat to us as human beings, and it is within our power to do something about it,” Ms. Harris told a New Hampshire crowd in 2019 when she was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. “I am supporting the Green New Deal,” she said to thunderous applause. [...] Now, young climate activists are hoping Ms. Harris will lean in to her progressive past. The problem is, so are Republicans. The National Republican Senatorial Committee this week issued talking points for party members calling Ms. Harris an “avowed radical” based in part on her Green New Deal support. “She has to walk a fine line,” said David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego. He said the phrase Green New Deal has become toxic, even among many moderate and independents.
RELATED: Kamala Harris’s Environmental and Climate Record, in Her Own Words
Kamala Harris can’t afford to return to her attacks on Big Oil by Tim McDonnell at Semafor. As president, Harris would inherit a huge amount of momentum behind the US clean energy manufacturing boom, and would likely push for even more taxpayer support. But she would also inherit record-breaking oil and gas production, and a world of consumers and industry leaders not ready to pull the plug on fossil fuels just yet. When Biden won the presidency, he threaded this needle by maintaining the “all-of-the-above”-type energy rhetoric that Barack Obama initiated. Biden’s climate policy was all about carrots, not sticks, a decision that helped keep it from getting snarled in court. Will Harris be willing to bring back the sticks? In the 2020 presidential primary she supported a ban on fracking, but reversed that position once she was on Team Biden, suggesting a willingness to compromise on more adversarial climate policies.
What Kind of Climate Candidate Will Kamala Harris Be? by Heather Souvaine Horn at The New Republic. That Harris would be a more pro-climate president than Trump is pretty clear—even to senior Republicans and Trump alums. But just how pro-climate would she be? Ultimately, it might be Harris’s time as senator that proves most tantalizing to those dedicated to the fine political art of tea-leaf scrutiny. Harris supported numerous pieces of environmental legislation during her time in the Senate—the Los Angeles Times points to the Clean School Bus Act of 2019, the Water Justice Act of 2019, and her support for limiting PFAS and lead exposure, among others. She was also one of the original co-sponsors of the Green New Deal. While the Biden administration has pursued policies aligned with the Green New Deal, Biden himself has typically refrained from letting those three words pass his lips, much as he’s often retreated into euphemism when it comes to abortion. There’s clearly a difference of some degree between Harris and Biden when it comes to language and rhetoric. Only time will tell what difference there might be in substance.
Harris offered a ‘blueprint’ for environmental justice. Can she grow it? by Kevin Bogardus at Greenwire. “I think she can play that role in moving climate justice, energy justice and environmental justice, in terms of that global leadership in this area,” said Robert Bullard, considered “the father of environmental justice.” Bullard said he would like to see Harris continue and broaden Biden’s legacy, boosting youth outreach with the American Climate Corps as well as be a voice on the world stage for those who could be left behind during the clean energy transition. “It’s important that she will build out and expand that interconnectivity” and “to build out resources that can make our country more resilient,” said Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. Harris began showcasing her environmental track record as she launched her campaign this week. “As district attorney, to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental justice units in our nation,” Harris told her campaign staff Monday. She compared that to Trump, who has asked oil and gas industry officials for $1 billion in campaign contributions.
An LNG processing plant in Cameron, Louisiana
Congress Must Stop Joe Manchin’s Dirtiest Deal. Allie Rosenbluth. U.S. Manager at Oil Change International stated in response to Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso releasing the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 this week. “Don’t be fooled: the Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else. It would unleash more drilling on federal lands and waters, unnecessarily rush the review of proposed oil and gas export projects, and lift the Biden administration’s pause on new LNG exports. The International Energy Agency has made it clear: no new fossil fuel project is compatible with a livable future. The United States already leads the world in oil and gas production and is failing to live up to its climate commitments. This bill is yet another dangerous attempt by Senator Manchin to line the pockets of his fossil fuel donors, sacrificing communities and our climate along the way. We urge Congress to reject this proposal and commit to action that protects frontline communities from the impacts of fossil fuel development and the climate crisis.”
The U.S. lacks enough skilled clean energy workers, but solutions are close at hand by Chris Dougher at Utility Dive. China’s advantage in clean energy manufacturing comes down to an investment in manufacturing infrastructure, including both physical assets and skilled labor. For America to achieve independence and success in the new energy economy, we need to build massive production capacity in our own country. In the last century, the private sector alongside government programs have reshaped America’s infrastructure and industrial capacity while creating new opportunities for millions of workers. Now, public-private partnerships can play a similar role to support the clean energy transformation, and workforce development will be a critical part of that effort. [...] For many companies, the investments made possible by the bipartisan infrastructure law will focus on the physical side — the facilities required to manufacture clean energy products. But there’s more to infrastructure than buildings and equipment. Manufacturing requires a skilled workforce — especially as the products we build and the facilities we operate become more technically sophisticated. But today, the American manufacturing sector faces a highly competitive marketplace for top talent.
Scientists Keep Measuring the Dead Zone. Let’s Fix the Fertilizer that Feeds It by Karen Perry Stillerman at the Union of Concerned Scientists. How big will the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” be this summer? I don’t know the answer, but it’s a perennial question this time of year, after spring rains have flushed excess fertilizer from Midwestern farm fields downriver into a warming Gulf, which encourages algae to bloom and then die, sucking oxygen from the water. In June, scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that this year’s resulting dead zone would be larger than average, covering an area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. We’ll know in the next week or two if they were right. In the meantime, I can think of three better questions: Why is there a dead zone in the Gulf anyway? What are policymakers doing about it? And what will it take to actually solve the problem? Let’s tackle those questions one at a time.
RESEARCH & REPORTS
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Roishetta Ozane
On the Gulf Coast, an Activist Rallies Her Community Against Gas Exports. An interview with Roishetta Ozane by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman at Yale e360. Over the last few years, the Gulf of Mexico has become ground zero for the U.S. liquid natural gas boom. The region has five LNG export facilities in operation, and at least 16 new export facilities have been approved or are under construction or regulatory review. Roishetta Ozane, a Lake Charles, Louisiana-based activist who cofounded the organization Vessel Project in the wake of back-to-back Gulf Coast hurricanes in 2020 that left her homeless, is currently rallying communities in Cameron Parish to block construction of an export terminal called Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2. If built, it will be one of the largest LNG export terminals in the country and, according to a Sierra Club estimate, annually produce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of more than 42 million cars. In the interview, Ozane explains why she is currently traveling the nation to educate voters about links between fossil fuel infrastructure, climate change, and racism. “We need to start talking about how these issues are connected,” she says, “how the people in these communities all look alike, and why they’ve been sacrificed for so long.”
‘Minimal’ land required for renewables expansion in Europe by Patrick Jowett at PV World. The European Environmental Bureau says 2.2% of the European Union’s total land can host all the solar and wind projects needed to phase out fossil fuels and nuclear power, achieving climate neutrality by 2040.The report, “Land for Renewables: Briefing on spatial requirements for a sustainable energy transition in Europe,” said most suitable land is in rural areas, including 78% of the space for ground-mounted solar, despite excluding areas of high natural or agricultural value. The research concludes that urban and industrial areas alone cannot meet all of Europe’s solar needs. Much renewables-suitable rural land is degraded farm land with low productivity and high risk of abandonment, providing an opportunity to revitalize these areas, support the local economy, and create jobs. The report said that renewables can coexist with agriculture and nature through agrivoltaics and calls for clear criteria to facilitate and prioritize the uptake of agrivoltaic systems in these rural areas.
US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year by at John Timmer at Arstechnica. The federal Energy Information Agency Thursday released electricity generation states for the first five months of 2024. Generation from solar power has soared by 25% compared to the same period in 2023. The EIA breaks down solar production according to the size of the plant. Large grid-scale facilities have their production tracked, giving the EIA hard numbers. For smaller installations, like rooftop solar on residential and commercial buildings, the agency has to estimate the amount produced, since the hardware often resides behind the metering equipment, so only shows up via lower-than-expected consumption. Utility-scale production from January through May rose 29% compared to the same period last year. Small-scale solar rose by 18% for a combined total rising by 25.3%. Most other generating sources were largely flat, year over year. This includes coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric, all of which changed by 2% or less. Wind was up by 4%, while natural gas rose by 5%. Because natural gas is the largest single source of energy on the grid, however, its 5% rise represents a lot of electrons—slightly more than the total increase in wind and solar.
We have a long, long way to go.
The people who feed America are going hungry by Ayurella Horn-Muller at Investigate Midwest and Grist. The very people who ensure the rest of the country has food to eat are going hungry. Although no one can say for sure how many farmworkers are food insecure (local studies suggest it ranges from 52% to 82%), advocates are sure the number is climbing, driven in no small part by climate change. The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019. Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system. “When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. He works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.
The Vineyard Wind Turbine Fiasco, Explained by Emily Pontecorvo at Heatmap. It’s been just over a week since one of the 350-foot-long blades of a wind turbine off the Massachusetts coast unexpectedly broke off, sending hunks of fiberglass and foam into the waters below. As of Wednesday morning, cleanup crews were still actively removing debris from the water and beaches and working to locate additional pieces of the blade. The blade failure quickly became a crisis for residents of Nantucket, where debris soon began washing up on the island’s busy beaches. It is also a PR nightmare for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, which is already on the defensive against community opposition and rampant misinformation about its environmental risks and benefits. The broken turbine is part of Vineyard Wind 1, which is being developed by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The project was still under construction when the breakage occurred, but it was already the largest operating offshore wind farm in the US, with ten turbines sending power to the New England Grid as of June. The plan is to bring another 52 online, which will produce enough electricity to power more than 400,000 homes. Now both installation and power generation have been paused while federal investigators look into the incident.
RELATED: Court leans toward Interior in Vineyard Wind NEPA fight.
Farmworkers pick bok choy in a field in Calexico, California.
Farmworkers Push Kroger’s Shareholders for Heat and Labor Protections by Grey Moran at Civil Eats. For years, farmworkers in the United States have been pressuring Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket, to come to the table to establish stronger labor protections on the farms supplying its fruits and vegetables. Specifically, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker rights organization in Florida, has repeatedly asked Kroger to join its Fair Food Program, which has implemented the strongest heat protections in the nation. Farmworkers took this a step further at Kroger’s annual shareholder meeting in late June, directing their plea for stronger human rights to the major financiers whose dividends depend on the under-recognized labor of farmworkers. They called upon the company’s shareholders—whose top investors are Vanguard, BlackRock, and Berkshire Hathaway—to support a proposal that Kroger publish a “just transition” report examining “how the risks to workers are changing due to rising temperatures” in its agricultural supply chain. In a speech at the meeting, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and current organizer with CIW, painted a picture for shareholders of the stark reality faced by U.S. farmworkers laboring under record-breaking temperatures—with no mandatory right to shade, water, or breaks in most states. The proposal, introduced by Domini Impact Investments, one of Kroger’s shareholders, adds pressure to the company to address these growing risks.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Workers Are Mobilizing for Protections Against Extreme Heat ¶Clean Energy Is Booming in Purple Wisconsin. Just Don’t Mention Climate Change ¶New study disputes Hunga Tonga volcano's role in 2023–24 global warm-up ¶Ice Sheets Melt Fast, Regrow Slowly ¶Wolverines Continue Their Comeback — This Time in Colorado ¶Octopus farming in the U.S. would be banned under a new bill in Congress ¶Millions of Californians face wildfire risks near oil wells ¶US cancels Gulf of Mexico offshore wind lease sale amid scarce commercial interest
