Under the headline Does the climate depend on the 2024 election? Yes and no,The Washington Post editorial board authored a disingenuous piece Saturday blaming environmentalists and basic environmental law itself for being key elements in a too-slow roll-out of renewable energy infrastructure. It posited this along with criticism of Biden administration climate policies and recommendations for Kamala Harris to move things along faster if she is elected president.
What the Post did not do, however, avoiding its usual avid penchant for bothsideism, was to assess Donald Trump’s climate policies with equal fervor. It allowed as how the former White House resident should accept that climate change is not a scam, and hallelujah! to that. But they sure love to legitimize Trump’s absurd claims with soft language.
The board undermined even that gentle poke with its jeer against critics’ claims that a second Trump presidency would mean destruction of climate funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and evisceration of new regulations on methane, cars, trucks, and power plants. According to the board, such “doomerism overstates” the possible Trump actions, and besides, they say, what President Joe Biden has accomplished in regard to climate and what a President Kamala Harris could accomplish—may not be all that much. The board provides supposed proof in a link to a Breakthrough Institute study about whose mixed conclusions they mislead.
Most infuriatingly, the editorial ignores Trump’s obviously tight though denied connections to the dystopian Project 2025 manifesto. As for supposed hyperbole about the perils of a Trump repeat performance, if the man has Congress behind him, Project 2025 has written a powerful prescription for him to fulfill. It would be utterly destructive of environmental protections, open the door to even more fossil fuel production, dismantle numerous government agencies and sub-agencies, including those that do research and development into renewables, and privatize climate-monitoring operations. The list for how to turn this extremist fever dream into reality is long. The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s sponsor and developer, has said second-term Trump should “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Energy Innovation, a non-partisan energy think-tank, conducted the modeling in a new report. It assessed the Project 2025 scenarios against both current policies and a hypothetical "continued climate leadership" scenario with expanded policies. Anand Gopal, Energy Innovation’s executive director of policy research, told The Guardian, “The U.S. faces a fork in the road starting in January of 2025 with two climate and energy policy pathways that are highly divergent.” According to the newspaper’s reporting on Energy Innovation’s take, following Project 2025’s approach would have gigantic consequences:
Such a burst of extra pollution would torpedo any chance the US could meet its goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030, which scientists say is imperative to help the world avert disastrous climate change. It would also, the analysis found, result in 1.7m lost jobs in 2030, due to reduced clean energy deployment that is not offset by smaller gains in fossil fuel jobs, and a $320bn hit to US GDP as a wave of new domestic renewables and electric car manufacturing is reversed.
Adopting this policy wishlist would, compared with business as usual, result in 2.7bn tonnes of extra emissions by 2030 and 26bn tonnes of further emissions by 2050, the point at which the world would need to have eliminated new fossil-fuel pollution entering the atmosphere to avoid climate breakdown, Energy Innovation found.
Instead of pointing to Project 2025 dangers, however, the Post tells us that a Trump 2.0 won’t hurt much on climate, that Biden hasn’t done much, and that it’s not clear if Harris will do much confronting of pesky environmentalists in order to speed things up. One might be tempted to think they’re telling us that, as regards climate, we could just as well toss a coin to determine who best to vote for in November.
From Energy Innovation:
Prior to passage of Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure law, CHIPS and major EPA rules, the U.S. was on track to emit 4,880 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2030, 26% below 2005 levels. Including progress on climate policy to date, the U.S. is now on track to emit 4,140 million metric tons in 2030, 37% below 2005 emissions. This progress more than doubles the historical rate of emissions and reductions and positions the U.S. to achieve its 2030 climate commitments.
Let’s have an interlude for a couple of disclaimers.
First, we definitely need to accelerate the green transition. If we’d started earlier we could proceed now at a luxurious pace. That’s no longer an option, thanks in part to media like the Post taking an appallingly long time to stop quoting climate science deniers as “balance” against the actual science. We need a president who will go all in with everything possible to accelerate the transition. Harris has given nobody reason to believe she won’t be that president. Trump has given us every reason to know he won’t.
Second, as Maxine Joselow writes, the Biden administration has been hampered from reducing fossil fuel production by market demands, by legal constraints, and by political opposition. Global oil and gas extraction is at its highest level ever and the U.S. is the single largest producer. That cannot, must not, continue. But as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee notes, “This is not an instant transition. We don’t flip a switch and totally eliminate fossil fuels. It’s a thermostat. And to turn down that thermostat, you need to have as aggressive a development of non-fossil-based sources as possible.”
In another annoyance, the Post’s editorial board implies that nobody in the administration is seriously thinking about how to ease restrictions and aggressively speed the build-out of renewables infrastructure. This is nonsense. The key holdup, as their own sources note, is congestion in the queue for approving connection of projects to the electrical grid.
Regular Earth Matters readers are familiar with this issue. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported earlier this year that there were 2,600 gigawatts of mostly renewable electricity-generating projects awaiting approval of their grid connection, with siting permits already in hand. By now, that humongous backlog has surely grown. The trouble is you can’t sell electricity if you can’t move it. For comparison, the entire U.S. generating capacity from all sources—water, solar, wind, geothermal, natural gas, nuclear—is 1,300 gigawatts. Hooking up even half the backlog queue would go a very long way toward reducing fossil fuel demand even as electricity demand rises.
So, yes, transmission is a serious gap that badly needs fixing. And after three years, work on an overhaul of a key part of federal transmission policy was produced this in April:
The Department of Energy issued a final rule to establish the Coordinated Interagency Transmission Authorizations and Permits (CITAP) Program, which aims to significantly improve federal environmental reviews and permitting processes for qualifying transmission projects.
This is not the whole answer to accelerating renewables adoption, of course, just as every other piece of the green transition isn’t the whole answer. It’s not only Rome that wasn’t built in a day. The Post ought to give more credit to the progress of policies that are scarcely two years old.
Moving the green transition faster means longstanding obstacles need to be cleared. But eco-protection laws need not be trampled to, for instance, more rapidly complete environmental impact statements for renewable projects. Looking for a quicker turnaround? Then boost the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding and hire more reviewers. It’s astonishing what can be accomplished when you’re not understaffed.
Speeding things up should also not mean trampling vulnerable communities by brushing off their concerns. We’ve been down that path. Over the past 150 years, our industrial, mining, and transportation systems were built on their sacrifices. They weren’t asked. Many of the impacts from this steamrolling remain with us today. History ought to deter us from restricting public input on energy projects now. But a Senate committee recently advanced legislation that would do exactly that, with a 90-day project approval deadline, which is just the sort of “reform” that creates more opposition.
Whatever the policy defects and inadequacies, the Biden administration has taken unprecedented steps to accelerate the ongoing green transition. And it’s done so despite continued obstructionism from Republicans who have made clear they will make things worse given the opportunity. JD Vance, the would-be vice president, actually wants a tax credit for buying gasoline- and diesel-powered cars to replace the credit for buying electric.
How many green transitional steps a Harris administration can take depends a great deal on who runs Congress come January. Will beefing up the federal government’s part in the transition be enough to mitigate or prevent some of the worst climate impacts? Who knows? That’s a tall order these days given our circumstances. However, you can lay odds on one thing. If Harris pushes hard on legislation and executive orders and other actions to address the climate crisis, the Post editorial writers will be back to spout something about going too far, too fast.
—MB
ECO-VIDEO
RESOURCES & ACTION
RESEARCH & STUDIES
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Factory pigs await their next meal and their fate.
How Factory Farming Ends from staff at Vox. What if we told you that there is a simple way for humanity to slash climate-warming emissions, help prevent the next pandemic, and simultaneously eradicate one of the most significant moral atrocities of our time — one that nearly all of us bear some responsibility for? We’re talking, of course, about factory farming. In 2024, it’s hardly a secret that the billions of animals raised for food are treated abysmally. They are, to name just a few standard industry practices, caged, mutilated without pain relief, and intensively bred to the point that they live in chronic pain and even struggle to stand up, before being slaughtered, often painfully. The sheer scale of this system defies comprehension. Every year, humans kill 80 billion land animals — 10 times more than there are people on Earth — and an even larger, poorly tracked number of fish. If the cost to animals wasn’t bad enough, industrial animal agriculture also spells peril for us: It fuels antibiotic resistance and zoonotic disease threats that keep scientists up at night. It’s a massive environmental liability, emitting what researchers estimate is between 14 percent and 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and devouring more than one-third of the planet’s habitable land. Yet factory farming is only expanding its reach around the globe, despite decades of animal advocacy striving to stop it, because it’s the most efficient way to produce lots of meat for a world of 8 billion people. We think there’s a better way.
Catching people who flee police in electric vehicles requires diversifying department fleets.
Police Diversify With EVs As Combustion Engines Can’t Keep Up by Wade Malone at Inside EVs. Police departments around the country find themselves at a crossroads. They have decades of investment in traditional combustion engine police vehicles, of which the Dodge Charger Pursuit is one of the most popular and among the quickest with a 6 second 0-60 time. But as electric vehicle ownership grows across the country, criminals are adapting. A suspect fleeing in a Tesla Model Y or Hyundai Ioniq 5 N can easily outrun a V6-powered Charger on city streets. As any muscle car driver who has been smoked by an electric crossover or family sedan will admit: electric vehicles have access to instant torque and acceleration 2-3 times faster than your typical combustion engine vehicle. For instance, a Kia EV6 GT can accelerate 0-60 in just 3.2 seconds according to testing done by the State of Michigan. So police departments nationwide have come to the realization that they need to diversify their fleet to adapt to this new reality.
Kaliko, a Native Hawaiian whose family has lived in West Maui for 19 generations, doesn't want what happened to her to happen to any other kids.
Indigenous youth are at the center of major climate lawsuits. Here’s why they’re suing by Anita Hofschneider at Grist. On August 8, 2023, 13-year-old Kaliko was getting ready for her hula class at her mother’s house in West Maui. The power was out, and she heard there was a wildfire in Lāhainā, where her dad lived, but she didn’t think much of it. Wildfires happened all the time in the summer. Within hours, Kaliko learned this wasn’t a normal fire, and that her dad’s house was gone. The Lāhainā fire consumed the town, killing 102 people and destroying more than 2,000 buildings, the flames fanned by a potent combination of climate change and colonialism. [August 8] marks the one-year anniversary of the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history, one that changed Hawaiʻi forever and made Kaliko more determined to defend her community. This summer she was part of a group of plaintiffs who forced the state of Hawaiʻi to agree to decarbonize its transportation system, which is responsible for half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now 14, she has spent the past year going to protests and testifying at water commission meetings to defend Indigenous water rights. She sees her advocacy as part of her kuleana, a Hawaiian word that connotes both a privilege and responsibility, to her community in West Maui where her Native Hawaiian family has lived for 19 generations.
Indigenous solar consultant works to ensure responsible development in communities scarred by fossil fuels by Kari Lydersen at Energy News Network. Growing up in Southern California, Saxon Metzger and his brother Ayda Donne — now 29 and 26 — didn’t think much about their Indigenous heritage in Oklahoma. Their great-grandmother’s family fled the reservation after her aunt saw her mother murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror, when locals brutally attacked tribal members over oil resources, as the brothers learned while researching the family history. In the past decade, the brothers began exploring this history, including the fossil-fuel linked violence and exploitation recently showcased in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Today, the Osage Nation is home to the country’s highest concentration of abandoned, uncapped oil and gas wells, which continue to leak methane and other dangerous pollutants. Now, Metzger and Donne are seeking to connect with and give back to the Osage Nation and other tribal communities by making sure clean energy does not leave its own legacy of abandonment or disinvestment. Eighth Generation Consulting, an organization Metzger founded, aims to provide solar decommissioning workforce training and project management, as well as promote solar installation.
The first floating offshore wind turbine "floatgen" is pictured off La Turballe, western France on September 28, 2018.
The prospects for offshore wind in California. An interview conducted by David Roberts at Volts with Adam Stern of Offshore Wind California and Jocelyn Brown-Saracino of the U,S. Department of Energy regardingCalifornia's policy efforts and the state of floating-wind technology. Excerpt:
David Roberts: I'm excited to dig into this. I've been wondering about this subject for ages. Like many things I wonder about for ages, it seems like all of a sudden everything is happening. So, we're going to cover that today. Adam, I want to start with you. Let's start with just a little bit of history here. I know I have followed the East Coast offshore wind saga somewhat closely. It's been going on for a long time. It's hard to say they're ahead of California since they barely actually built anything. But there are actually a few operative turbines off East Coast waters now.
So, give us a little history of the discussion of offshore wind on the West Coast. Why is it so far behind the East Coast, and what has happened and what has brought us to where we are today?
Adam Stern: Sure, David. That's a great question. So, the context is, beginning in 2016, the state of California, through its agencies like the California Energy Commission, the California Public Utilities Commission, and other players, started discussions with the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. That's an agency that's part of the US Department of the Interior, which has jurisdiction over sea space off the coast for the development of offshore wind. Those discussions eventually led to a lease auction in December of 2022, where the federal government put out five wind energy areas 20 to 30 miles offshore of California's coast and awarded eventually — after the bidding results were in — leases to five companies to begin the process of planning offshore wind farms.
That's how we get to the lease auction and the leaseholders.
Earth’s oldest, tiniest creatures are poised to be climate change winners – and the repercussions could be huge by Ryan Heneghan at The Conversation. The world’s oceans are home to microscopic organisms invisible to the human eye. The tiny creatures, known as “prokaryotes,” comprise 30% of life in the world’s oceans. These organisms play an important role in keeping the oceans in balance. But new research by myself and colleagues shows this balance is at risk. We found prokaryotes are remarkably resilient to climate change—and as a result, could increasingly dominate marine environments. This could reduce the availability of fish humans rely on for food, and hamper the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon emissions.
ECO-TWXXT
ECOPINION
Why the right to peaceful protest is essential in the fight against destructive climate change from staff at the Environmental Investigative Agency. Five climate activists from the campaigning organisation Just Stop Oil were last month given unprecedented, lengthy prison sentences for the act of planning a peaceful protest. The campaigners were given between four and five years for engaging in a Zoom call in which disruption of roadways was discussed. These sentences are the result of the controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and other new laws brought forward in 2022 and 2023, designed to stop activists using civil disobedience and non-violent direct action against government or corporate inaction. July’s sentences, which are the longest for non-violent protest in UK history, are the direct result of these draconian policies.
David Schleicher
What the YIMBY Movement Can Teach the Climate Movement by Matthew Zeitlan at Heatmap News. Why don’t we build things? Yale Law School professor David Schleicher, who studies local government and land use, has been trying to answer this question for years. While Schleicher typically writes about housing, his latest work — an essay literally called “Why Can’t We Build?” for the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty — is useful for thinking about why we don't have as much green energy infrastructure as we need. “Despite a generation of low interest rates and innovation in many non-physical realms,” he writes, “there are few physical monuments that we will pass to future generations — where are today’s Brooklyn Bridges or Hoover Dams?” There are certainly explanations for this lack of infrastructural boldness. But more importantly, what are the reasons for it? The explanations are often local restrictions on growth. When it comes to housing, that might mean zoning regulations that limit what kind of structures can be built where or fees that are sometimes charged to multifamily units. For renewable energy, developers of wind and solar might find themselves coming up against noise restrictions, rules that essentially require minimum amounts of land for installations, or even outright bans on certain types of generation.
How to Decolonize Our Battle Against Climate Change. Rich countries have exported climate breakdown through extractive industries, creating a “carbon colonialism” by Laurie Parsons at Wiki Observatory. We already have the ways and means to decolonize how we measure, mitigate, and adapt to climate change. This task is as sizable as it is vital, but at its core are three priorities. First, carbon emissions targets based on national production must be abandoned in favor of consumption-based measures, which, though readily available, tend to be marginalized for rich nations’ political convenience. Secondly, with half of emissions in some wealthy economies now occurring overseas, environmental and emissions regulation must be applied as rigorously to supply chains as they are to domestic production. By adopting these new viewpoints, we can aim towards a final priority: recognizing how the global factory manufactures the landscape of disaster. Our globalized economy is built on foundations designed to siphon materials and wealth to the rich world while leaving waste in its place. Yet there is, as ever, another way. It is possible to reject the globalization of environmental value by giving voice to the people it belongs to. Environments do not have to be merely abstract commodities. Giving greater value to how people think about their local environments is seen as a way to decolonize our environmental thinking, move away from extractivism, and perhaps forestall the slow death of nature that began in the 1700s.
Ben Jealous
There’s a Straight Line From Voting Rights to Climate Justice by Ben Jealous at Sierra magazine. As we celebrate the 59th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act this month, it is important we remember a crucial fact: The only way to tackle the complex challenges of our time is with a democracy that is responsive to the people it represents. From racial justice to economic opportunity, gun violence to health care, education to reproductive freedom, there is no issue that stands out as an exception to this rule. Certainly, our ability to tackle the climate crisis—one of our most urgent challenges, and the most existential for our planet—depends on the strength of our democracy. [...] The fight against climate change is not just a scientific or environmental issue but also a deeply political and democratic one. The climate crisis is a global emergency that demands immediate attention and action, and it is the people who have the power to drive and influence our leaders and policymakers to prioritize that action.
How to Debunk the ‘Need’ for Destructive Road Widenings. Transportation agencies have a thousand reasons why they need "just one more lane, bro." Here's how to spot their distortions and lies and call them out. by Kea Wilson at Streetsblog. When state transportation agencies widen a highway, they tend to put out a buzzy press release about all the exciting new "improvements" that are coming to the road, without any mention of how disastrous that "upgrade" will really be for the climate, safety, and equity in our communities. Some of the language they use, though, can be surprisingly hard to spot – unless you're an advocate in the know. Inspired by the incredible advocates at the Freeway Fighters Network, here's a cheatsheet of eight common arguments, distortions, and outright lies that transportation officials use to sell the public on widening streets and roads — and how to debunk them.
Europe’s Crackdown on Environmental Dissent Is Silencing Voices the World Needs to Hear by Christopher Ketcham at The New York Times. A British court last month issued extraordinarily harsh prison sentences to five climate activists convicted of helping to plan a series of road blockades in London. One of the activists, Roger Hallam, 58, a co-founder of the direct action groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, got five years. The others were each sentenced to four years. Mr. Hallam’s crime wasn’t that he participated in the protest, which snarled London’s major beltway, the M25, during four days in November 2022. He merely gave a 20-minute talk on Zoom, a few days before the event, to explain the tactics of civil disobedience and emphasize its value as society’s failure to curb carbon emissions is increasing the chance of catastrophe within our lifetimes. He also stated during the Zoom call that he thought the action should go forward. This is only the latest example of a wave of repressive government measures against climate protesters across Europe. The crackdown has come in response to a rise in demonstrations and disruptive tactics such as blocking roads and access to airports, defacing art in museums and interrupting sporting events. [...] Michel Forst, the United Nations special rapporteur on environmental defenders, sees this crackdown as “a major threat to democracy and human rights,” as he put it in a report in February.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Sweden shows how to slash emissions while boosting the economy ¶Inside Big Oil’s Business as Usual: Failure on Climate and Profits from War ¶EVs now beat rail as the largest electricity consumer in the US transport sector ¶High-tech textiles can protect workers from the heat — but not from their bosses ¶A line-by-line fact check on climate claims in the Musk-Trump interview ¶Arizona Residents Fear What the State’s Mining Boom Will Do to Their Water ¶Parts of Canada’s Boreal Forest Are Burning Faster Than They Can Regrow ¶Scientists achieve more than 98% efficiency in removing nanoplastics from water
