An essential ingredient of the green transition is moving electricity generated from wind, solar, and geothermal sources to their end users. That will require a big upgrade of the nation’s inadequate transmission system, much of which qualifies as antique.
But getting new transmission lines built has always been politically complicated. These days, utility lobbyists, local governments, environmental restrictions, and rank-and-file Americans in the path of such projects all contribute to a permitting process that can take a decade from proposal to approval. Insular interests, including those of the utilities themselves, mean many proposed or wished-for lines never get built. That is a big problem for the transition.
For example, according to the Berkeley Lab, at the end of last year, there was a 2,600-gigawatt backlog of energy and storage capacity in transmission grid interconnections. Of that, 95% is for solar, wind, and storage. That’s eight times larger than the backlog of 10 years ago. To show how big a deal that is, the entire U.S. grid has a generating capacity of 1,300 gigawatts from ALL sources. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has recently changed its rules, which will help move things along a little faster. But only a little.
Accelerating the approval process is a must if we are to have any chance of getting off the fossil fuels that are killing us in time to mitigate or ameliorate some of the worst climate impacts. But, as we found out in a bipartisan Senate committee vote last Tuesday, there is a price to be paid to make that happen. And many climate activists think it’s too high.
With six Democrats and Democrat-caucusing Independents in favor, the 15-4 vote in the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee sent S. 4753 to the full Senate. There it faces an uncertain future as it will in the House if it gets that far. Were it to pass and manage to get a signature from the president, it would be a major victory for Sen. Joe Manchin, the one-time coal baron and center-right Democrat recently turned Independent who chairs the committee. Together with the committee’s top Republican, John Barrasso, a one-time climate science denier from Wyoming who has complained about the Biden administration’s “obsession” with climate matters, Manchin wrangled a solidly bipartisan bill into being. A “compromise” that climate activists have labeled a “dirty deal.”
The succinct version? The bill would ease regulatory hurdles and speed up environmental approval timeframes for renewable installations, for new and upgraded transmission lines, and for oil, gas, and coal projects. It would enshrine a ban on pausing liquefied natural gas terminals approvals (something a district court judge already has done), require the federal government to hold regular leasing auctions in on- and offshore areas that oil and gas companies have shown interest in rather than the Department of Interior’s choices, and undermine public input. It would shove more pollution down the throats of front-line communities, and reduce government authority over drilling on private land, something critics say could mean even more abandoned wells belching toxins and methane. Some projects that aren’t approved within 90 days would be automatically approved even though environmental reviews are typically many hundreds of pages long and take months to digest.
So this devil’s bargain would further the transition to clean energy that’s crucial in addressing the climate crisis by also clearing the way for new infrastructure that extends our usage of the very fossil fuels that have caused that crisis. This is exactly what scientists say we must not do. Perhaps the deal should be signed in blood.
Said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity: “This Frankenstein legislation is nothing less than the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry. The insignificant crumbs thrown at renewable energy do nothing to address the climate crisis, but instead would make it game over for a livable planet."
Hartl’s harsh objections weren’t the only ones. More than 360 organizations led by Earth Justice sent a letter to Senators, noting:
This legislation guts bedrock environmental protections, endangers public health, opens up tens of millions of acres of public lands and hundreds of millions of acres of offshore waters to further oil and gas leasing, gives public lands to mining companies, and would de facto rubber-stamp gas export projects that harm frontline communities and perpetuate the climate crisis. The provisions fast tracking Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exports alone could lock in new annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 165 coal-fired power plants and the potential to lock in additional hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution each year for decades to come. [...]
This legislation will also lead to more leasing, more drilling without federal oversight and community input, more industry interest in lands adjacent to federal lands, more irresponsible speculation, less mitigation, and more orphaned and abandoned wells. These provisions will gut protections for millions of acres of public lands and greatly elevate oil and gas extraction as the highest use of public lands — and will hamstring renewable energy deployment on public lands and on the outer continental shelf by further tying it to oil and gas leasing.
In a statement, Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels policy director Mahyar Sorour said that "those who promote this kind of so-called 'permitting reform' claim that it's necessary to accelerate the deployment of clean energy, but in truth this is nothing more than yet another attempt by fossil fuel industry boosters to give handouts for polluters at the expense of our communities and the climate. [...] We urge Congress to put forward real solutions to build a clean energy economy, and not pair those reforms with more attempts to pad the pockets of fossil fuel executives under the guise of reducing emissions."
The climate hawks on the committee, Sen. Mazie Hirono, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Sen. Ron Wyden voted against advancing the bill because of their view it would give too much to fossil fuel interests. Wyden reportedly was most irked because industry rather than the Interior Department would get to decide where companies can drill. But he said he was “reluctant” to vote against it because “I certainly agree with much in this bill.”
Joe Manchin aside, clearly the other committee Democrats and Independent Angus King weighed the bill and found its benefits to exceed its detriments. The problem with their assessment is that this is just another example of letting fossil fuel interests hold renewables hostage. Manchin finagled a similar situation in the Inflation Reduction Act by tying renewable energy rights of way to oil and gas lease auctions on federal land on- and offshore. The permitting bill could be his last hurrah. Proof of his negotiating skills. However, labeling this a compromise is putting lipstick on a pig in a poke.
To be clear, as Wyden says there’s a lot to like here. So, it’s tempting obviously to give something to get something. Nobody is totally happy but everybody’s a little bit happy and willing to swallow a bit of unhappy. But this deal is nothing to smile about. It sanctifies the very behavior we can no longer afford.
The fossil fuel faucet now flowing at record levels cannot be instantly turned off without collapsing the global economy and probably civilization itself. But scientists started nearly four decades ago repeatedly warning that serious, gradual efforts should begin right then to cut back greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, they said, we’d face the prospect of having to impose more draconian measures in the future. Now is that future. Despite its renewable-friendly provisions, the Manchin-Barrasso bill would add to the ongoing delay to get serious by opening the tap even wider.
Permitting reform is definitely needed. But not to make it easier to expand or perpetuate the use of fossil fuels. Legislation like the A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act is a possible choice. Named after the late Democratic Virginia congressman, the bill was introduced last year by Sens. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Cory Booker of New Jersey in the Senate and Reps. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Barbara Lee of California in the House. It would mandate ample public notification and meaningful community review of all new energy projects. Federal agencies would also be required to evaluate the environmental justice impacts of proposed projects during the permitting process.
With hellish heatwaves killing ever more people and other species worldwide, with 1,000-year floods submerging Vermont and 5,000-year floods doing the same in Henan, China, and with unprecedented numbers of wildfires casting their smoky pall from Siberia to Chile, there shouldn’t be any need to install a flashing neon sign in the Capitol rotunda for our situation to be understood. Shouldn’t be.
No Democratic U.S. senators call the climate crisis a hoax or a scam. They accept that the planet is heating up and that human activities are most of the cause. They agree that we must quickly change. The Manchin-Barrasso bill flies in the face of that. They should kill it.
—MB
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HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Break-up of the sea ice tongue of the Thwaites Glacier of Antartica as photographed August 2, 2024. The floating tongue has acted as a cork to keep the glacier from flowing rapidly into the Amundsen Sea.
Antarctica experiences unprecedented midwinter heat wave by Kasha Patel at The Washington Post. East Antarctica is experiencing a massive heat wave, with temperatures spiking far above normal, highlighting the ongoing impacts of climate change on polar regions.
- Ground temperatures in East Antarctica have skyrocketed by more than 50°F (28°C) above normal.
- A weakened polar vortex has led to a sudden stratospheric warming event disrupting usual weather patterns.
- Scientists say decreasing sea ice and warming oceans are contributing to more frequent and intense heat waves in Antarctica.
As an EHN curator explains: Imagine the freezer door being left open, and you’ll get the picture. As climate change continues to rewrite the Earth's weather patterns, these heatwaves could become more frequent, pushing Antarctica's ice into the danger zone. Said Edward Blanchard, atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, “It is likely that having less sea ice and a warmer Southern Ocean around the Antarctic continent ‘loads the dice’ for warmer winter weather over Antarctica.”
RELATED: Newly identified tipping point for ice sheets could mean greater sea level rise
The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get by Simon Lee, Hayley Fowler & Paul Davies at The Conversation. Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every 10 years. The most recent climate period is 1991–2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change. This way of thinking about the climate falls short when the climate itself is rapidly changing. Global average temperatures have increased at around 0.2° C per decade over the past 30 years, meaning that the global climate of 1991 was around 0.6° C cooler than that in 2020 (when accounting for other year-to-year fluctuations) and even more so than the present day. If the climate is a range of possible weather events, then this rapid change has two implications. First, it means that part of the distribution of weather events comprising a 30-year climate period occurred in a very different background global climate: for example, northerly winds in the 1990s were much colder than those in the 2020s in northwest Europe, thanks to the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Statistics from three decades ago no longer represent what is possible in the present day. Second, the rapidly changing climate means we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce. In a stable climate, scientists would have multiple decades for the atmosphere to get into its various configurations and drive extreme events, such as heatwaves, floods, or droughts. We could then use these observations to build up an understanding of what the climate is capable of. But in our rapidly changing climate, we effectively have only a few years—not enough to experience everything the climate has to offer.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz
Minnesota governor was a climate champion even before he called Trump ‘weird’ by Adam Aton at ClimateWire. After Minnesota Democrats defied midterm expectations and won narrow control of state government, it took Gov. Tim Walz about a month to pass one of the country’s biggest climate laws. Then, a few months later, he did it again. “It’s not about banking political capital for the next election,” Walz said at the close of the 2023 Legislature, after wielding a one-vote majority to pass stronger climate policies than many solidly Democratic states. “It’s about burning political capital to improve lives.” Now, as Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, considers Walz as a potential running mate, the governor’s supporters say his climate record shows what Walz could bring to the ticket. He is a former small-town teacher whose style of approachable progressivism resonates beyond the Democratic base — with the receipts, like his climate laws, to prove it. “There’s just no other governor in the country who can point to a track record like that,” said Saul Levin, a national climate organizer from Michigan who sees Walz cracking the code for Democrats to campaign on climate with confidence.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro
Josh Shapiro’s popular climate crusade: Plugging old oil wells by Benjamin Storrow at Climate Wire. There are an estimated 350,000 abandoned oil and gas wells across Pennsylvania — and Gov. Josh Shapiro is keeping track of the ones that have been plugged. The Democrat has seized on the issue since taking office in 2023, a move that could boost his environmental credentials as Vice President Kamala Harris considers him as a running mate in the presidential race. Shapiro announced in March that his administration had plugged its 200th well — more than the state had plugged in the previous nine years combined. “There is a broader, bigger story in plugging these gas wells, and Shapiro is very adept at telling that story,” said John Hanger, who served as secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection under former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. “He is very good at making the case that wise public investments make individuals' lives better, communities stronger and our environment cleaner.”
Octavia E. Butler
How Octavia Butler’s 1993 book ‘Parable of the Sower’ predicted our climate reality by Syris Valentine at Grist. On July 20, 2024, Lauren Olamina turned 15. Or, at least, she did in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The 1993 dystopian classic recounts the life and times of a Black girl who shares the pain of others. Lauren lives with this burden in a version of the present that greed, poverty, violence, and climate change have ravaged even more than our own. Through a collection of journal entries, we traverse the mid 2020s as Butler, the famed science fiction author, dreamt them. And we watch as Lauren struggles to survive what later becomes called “the Pox,” a kind of dream-slang for the apocalypse. Thirty-one years after its publication, Parable of the Sower continues to compel and unsettle many readers. Much of the book is harrowing. The violence begins just a few chapters in, when an elderly woman in Lauren’s walled-off urban village kills herself in the emotional aftermath of losing her entire family to a house fire just weeks after she was robbed and raped, and it refuses to relent for the next 300 pages. But Parable is, at its core, hopeful. Over the course of the story, Lauren works to refine, systematize, and share the belief system she has developed, called “Earthseed,” which she presents through poems and verses collected alongside her journal entries. In Earthseed, “God is Change,” and the task of humanity and the faithful is to learn how to transform from God’s victim into God’s partner — to become one who shapes change. Once solely a piece of speculative fiction set in a horrifying future, Parable has finally crossed the temporal threshold into the present, bringing added importance to its message of directing change. That message, and the ways in which Lauren acknowledges the changes coming for her and prepares to respond to them, is crucial for our current moment. She teaches us how to acknowledge the hardships ahead without succumbing to doom.
Community Science Ignites Hope for Bumble Bee Conservation by Anne Readel at Sierra magazine. “There’s one!” Armed with a digital camera and telephoto lens, Bob Plamann quickly snapped some photos of a small, fuzzy insect flitting across a field of wildflowers. He had found and photographed an endangered rusty patched bumble bee. On a sweltering summer day last year, Plamann was one of several volunteers searching for the elusive bee in a conservancy near Madison, Wisconsin. His wife, Judy Cardin, had just taught participants how to identify rusty patched bumble bees, and the group was thrilled with their discovery. When the couple went home, they submitted Plamann’s photos to the Wisconsin Bumble Bee Brigade, a community science program run by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Their goal: to help scientists and land managers map the distribution and plant preferences of bumble bees throughout the state. Bumble bees in North America are declining rapidly due to habitat loss, pesticides, pathogens, and climate change. According to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, 28 percent of all North American bumble bees are now at risk of extinction. This includes the rusty patched bumble bee photographed by Plamann, which became the first bumble bee species listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2017. While bumble bees are essential pollinators for many wild plants and agricultural crops, data is often lacking on their ranges, population sizes, and basic natural history, making conservation efforts difficult. To help gather necessary data, numerous community science programs (also known as citizen science or participatory science programs), such as the Wisconsin Bumble Bee Brigade, Bumble Bee Watch, and Bumble Bee Atlas, have sprung up across North America over the last decade. These programs recruit volunteers to submit photos of bumble bees they’ve observed. Experts validate the submissions, and the data is used by researchers and land managers to track and conserve bumble bee populations.
ECO-QUOTE
“Because we don’t think about future generations, they will never forget us.”—Henrik Tikkanen
ECOPINION
How to Blunt the ‘New Climate Denial’ with Better Language, an interview with Genevieve Guenther by Geoff Dembicki at DeSmog: The idea that the climate debate can be neatly divided into two competing camps — with Republican deniers on the right and Democratic advocates on the left — is one of the many myths that Genevieve Guenther takes on in her new book The Language of Climate Politics. A climate communications expert and founder of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, Guenther writes that the reality is that fossil fuel industry talking points permeate the political spectrum, contributing to a mainstream consensus that producing ever more oil, coal and gas is fine even as the planet burns. One way to blunt this “new climate denial,” as she calls it, is better and more effective language that puts a phase-out of fossil fuels at the center of the climate action agenda. explains how oil and gas companies weaponize the language of climate advocates, why it can be a waste of time trying to engage with Fox News viewers and what needs to happen to put truly transformative climate action at the top of political agendas everywhere.
Trump has big plans for climate and energy policy, but can he implement them? by Samantha Gross & Louison Sall at Brookings. Donald Trump has made clear in his campaign that he supports a significant shift in U.S. energy policy, characterized by a robust emphasis on fossil fuels, extensive regulatory rollbacks, and a scaling back of renewable energy policies. [...] He does a great deal of posturing on deregulating drilling, rolling back electric vehicles, stopping energy-based inflation, and energy independence, but his results in achieving this agenda will be mixed. Several of Trump’s oft-repeated statements about U.S. energy just aren’t true, including his boasts about the size of U.S. energy resources and his complaints about energy’s contribution to inflation. Additionally, a future Trump administration could not accomplish all of his energy-related objectives alone. Many of these goals would require actions from Congress, whose composition is up in the air until the election. The previous Trump administration’s track record on changing energy and environment policy was spotty at best, although he would likely bring in more experienced staff who are more capable of implementing his deregulatory agenda in a second term. Indeed, a rightward shift in the federal courts and several recent Supreme Court decisions make Trump’s deregulatory agenda easier to achieve.
Victor Gilinsky
Why US nuclear waste policy got stalled. And what to do about it by Victor Gilinsky at the Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists. The lack of a repository doesn’t seem to worry nuclear enthusiasts anymore, probably because it doesn’t threaten what reactor licensing there is. Recent legislation—the ADVANCE Act—to accelerate approval of new nuclear technologies does not mention nuclear waste at all. The focus is on subsidizing new reactor projects and “streamlining” licensing. The United States, however, does need a better system for storing highly radioactive used fuel than the current situation of keeping it at over 80 storage locations in 36 states. A difficulty is that current law requires that, before the Energy Department can go forward with a surface storage facility to consolidate the used fuel, it has to have already selected a new geologic repository site, which isn’t happening. This restriction was inserted into the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to prevent the government from siting a “temporary” storage facility and then giving up on an underground repository for permanent disposal of the waste. Now, because of this restriction, the United States has neither centralized storage nor a repository, and the waste keeps piling up. Relaxing the provision in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that has prevented temporary consolidated storage has to be the starting point of a sensible nuclear waste policy.
It’s time for Azerbaijan to shift gears on diplomacy ahead of COP29 by Manuarl Pulgar-Vidal at Climate Home News. In just four months, Azerbaijan will be in the global spotlight for two weeks when it will be responsible for spearheading UN climate talks in Baku. Government, businesses, media and civil society are anxious to know what the COP29 Presidency has been doing to shift the gears on diplomacy and ramp up global ambition. The task at hand is clear. First, we need a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Second, we need a strong climate finance goal to deliver on this. Third, we need countries to submit ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that respond to the Global Stocktake and robustly adhere to the science. The COP29 Presidency has a crucial strategic role to play in building pressure on countries to demonstrate what they are doing to meet all these commitments. Finding the landing ground on these pillars cannot wait until November. The real work is done in the months and weeks before the summit. Let’s not forget that the COP28 deal was meant to mark the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. Yet, progress on this since the Dubai summit has been woefully slow. The window for a 1.5℃ future is closing fast and Azerbaijan, a significant fossil exporter itself, cannot ignore the root cause of the problem.
Manuel Pulgar–Vidal is the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Lead for Climate and Energy and, previously, was the COP20 president.
A magical look at the ocean off Monhegan Island, Maine, painted by Kosack Ralphdog.
We’re Protecting the Ocean Wrong by David Schiffman at The Revelator. A surprisingly common issue in area-based conservation happens when a government declares a new protected area to help save a threatened species of concern…without first checking to see if the species actually lives within those boundaries. It happens more often than you might think. A new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology looked at 89 marine protected areas in Europe that are supposed to protect diadromous fish species (those that migrate between ocean and fresh water, like salmon or some eels) of conservation concern. Their findings are shocking: Many of these areas protect habitats where those fish species do not live, and very few of them protect the most important core habitat for any diadromous fish species. “A marine protected area should be an area that protects part of the marine environment,” says Sophie Elliott of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, the study’s lead author. “I say ‘should’ because there are a lot of parks that don’t have enough thought put into them. Quite often things are done quickly without thinking or understanding the situation.”
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Can New York City Treat Its Food Scraps as More Than Trash? ¶Can A Vaccine Reduce Methane Emissions From Cow Burps? ¶The SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rule Will Reveal Healthcare’s Significant Climate Risk Exposure ¶US energy reform bill a “wishlist for the fossil industry” ¶Offshore wind farms connected by an underwater power grid for transmission could revolutionize how the East Coast gets its electricity ¶Study finds heavy metals in many dark chocolate products in the US ¶Wind and solar energy overtake fossil fuels to provide 30% of EU electricity ¶Which US states are leading the way on offshore wind? ¶Trump Is Once Again Back On His Bird Bulls**t ¶Robots Are Coming, and They’re on a Mission: Install Solar Panels ¶As World Warms, Global Heat Deaths Are Grossly Undercounted
