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On the conference's stalemate, a new youth lawsuit, and Ford's production cuts
Current conditions: It’s getting windy in Queensland as Tropical Cyclone Jasper approaches land. America’s chances of a white Christmas are looking increasingly slim. It’s cold but sunny in Washington, D.C., today, where Ukrainian President Zelensky will meet with President Biden.
Negotiators at the COP28 climate summit remain divided over the text that will appear in the final deal to emerge from the conference, and in particular whether the text will call on countries to phase out fossil fuels. The conference was scheduled to end this morning but is running into overtime. Yesterday an updated draft text was swiftly and widely condemned in part because it eliminated the “phase out” language in an attempt to appease Saudi Arabia, among other nations. This morning COP28 Director General Majid Al Suwaidi said that draft was just a starting point for talks. He added that the United Arab Emirates COP presidency wants the text to include fossil fuels but that in the end, it will be up to the nations in attendance to come to an agreement. A new draft of the text is expected sometime today.
Youth climate activist Licypriya Kangujam interrupts COP28 demanding an end to fossil fuels. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
A group of 18 kids in California is suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), accusing it of failing to protect them from the effects of climate change and therefore violating their constitutional rights. The lawsuit, Genesis B. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, was filed by the Oregon-based nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust, the same firm that in August represented a group of Montana children in their successful landmark climate suit against that state. The Genesis suit calls climate change the “single greatest driver of the health of every child born today” and says young people are “actively being harmed and discriminated against by their government’s affirmative allowance of dangerous levels of climate pollution.” The plaintiffs don’t want compensation, but are asking “for various declarations about the environmental rights of children and the EPA's responsibility to protect them,” NPR reports.
Ford will significantly scale back production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck in 2024, Automotive News reports, citing an internal memo. The company had planned to make 3,200 trucks per week but will cut that in half to 1,600, “marking a major reversal after the automaker significantly increased plant capacity for the electric vehicle in 2023,” explains CNBC. EV sales continue to climb: F-150 Lightning sales are up 53% year over year. But even so, the pace of growth hasn’t matched some automakers’ ambitious expectations as prices and interest rates remain stubbornly high. As a result, companies including Ford are being forced to pull back on their EV investment and expansion plans. A Ford spokesperson said the company will “continue to match production with customer demand.”
A quarter of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of extinction due to environmental degradation, according to a new assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Climate change and pollution pose some of the biggest threats to freshwater fish, but overfishing, dam construction, and invasive species also play a part. The assessment found that the global population of Atlantic salmon plummeted by 23% between 2006 and 2020. “Ensuring freshwater ecosystems are well managed, remain free-flowing with sufficient water, and good water quality is essential to stop species declines and maintain food security, livelihoods and economies in a climate resilient world,” says Kathy Hughes, co-chair of the IUCN SSC Freshwater Fish Specialist Group.
Europe’s largest economies have managed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production by nearly 25% over the last five years by switching from fossil fuels to renewables, Reutersreports, citing data from electricitymaps.com. Emissions from electricity generation across Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands have declined by 156 million tonnes in 2023 compared to 2018. “As every major European economy is set to expand renewables generation further each year through the rest of this decade, the region's overall carbon intensity will continue to decline, and will likely help the region emerge as the global hub for low-carbon electricity generation by 2030,” Reuters’ Gavin Maguire says.
“While it may look broken in the short term, somehow this dysfunctional process can still deliver.” –Eve Tamme, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, speaking to Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer on the future of COP.
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They may not survive a full challenge, though.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Fund, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.
Has Plug Power pulled the plug on its upstate New York facility?
In 2021, top elected officials in New York state promised that Plug Power, a nascent company in the growing hydrogen industry, would build a large hydrogen fuel production facility in the Buffalo-Rochester area. It was supposed to make the state an industry leader.
Today, the project is looking more like a warning sign about the perils of being a first-mover in the unproven hydrogen business.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Plug Power, an American hydrogen and fuel cell producer founded in 1997, believed it would capitalize on rising demand for the liquid fuel when it broke ground at its hydrogen production facility at Genesee County’s Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park in 2021, a project known colloquially as STAMP. Heavy polluting industries like steel and transportation were chomping at the bit to strike supply deals for hydrogen, a liquid fuel that produces no carbon when burned. And this New York plant would on paper be particularly attractive from a climate perspective: It would be powered by hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls, offering a potential carbon reduction of an estimated 14,000 tons of CO2 per year. It would also be the largest project of its kind in the Northeast.
Three years later and the project appears to be on ice, according to a phone call recording between New York county officials and a real estate developer that was obtained by Heatmap News.
Construction stopped in January, per the call, as did work Plug Power promised to do on an electrical substation that will also power a neighboring semiconductor manufacturing plant. Now energy-hungry data center developers are bidding to pick up the substation work instead in exchange for a spot at STAMP and access to some of the remaining hydroelectricity, and county officials are looking at buying Plug Power’s electrical equipment.
It is unclear whether the hydrogen production plant will ever be completed.
“They’ve put things on hold and now we’re coming to pick up the pieces,” Chris Suozzi, an executive vice president at the Genessee County Economic Development Authority, told one bidder – PRP Real Estate Management – on a call last month. PRP taped the call and shared it with us after it was first reported by local news nonprofit InvestigativePost. Suozzi also said on the call: “They’re not ready to go. They’re on pause. We don’t know what’s going to happen with them at this point.”
The New York Plug Power plant’s problems should be familiar to anyone in the climate tech startup space but for the unfamiliar, the company’s rapid growth seems to have run headlong into struggles with cash. A year ago Plug Power said in an investor filing there was a “substantial” concern the company may not have “sufficient funds to fund [its] operations through the next 12 months.” So problematic are Plug’s financial woes that they’ve become a political target; after the Energy Department offered a $1.6 billion conditional loan commitment to Plug for building hydrogen production plants, Republicans in Congress called for an inspector general investigation into the move.
But the New York production facility won’t benefit from the potential loan either. We’ve learned from two sources familiar with the matter that the project is not included in its potential loan application currently pending before DOE.
Then there has been the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act. Even though the project relies on carbon-free hydropower, it may not qualify for the IRA’s hydrogen production tax credit because of proposed requirements for fuel to rely on new renewable energy sources (known as “additionality”). This has been a major sticking point in implementation of the credit, and Plug Power is quoted in InvestigativePost last week linking the work stoppage at the production facility on waiting for the final regulation implementing the credit. This is even as the company uses the yet-to-be finalized credit in its financial analyses for other hydrogen facilities in operation today, like this one in Georgia.
Environmental justice issues have also been a drag on development. The native Tonawanda Seneca Nation is opposed to the entire industrial park because of the resulting impacts on wildlife, noise and the visual landscape. In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service revoked a necessary permit for a wastewater treatment pipeline that would be used by companies at the park.
Earthjustice attorney Alex Page – who is working with the Nation to fight the project – told me the tribe was told last year by the Energy Department that Plug Power had withdrawn the New York site from its loan application. The Nation will continue to fight the project and DOE’s loan financing to Plug Power on the chance that money could be reprogrammed to the industrial park. Page said: “The Nation remains very, very much opposed.”
We sent Plug Power multiple requests for comment as well as Suozzi. A representative for Plug Power declined to answer questions about the project. I got a text from a number listed for Suozzi asking to chat later, but I didn’t hear back before publication.
The week’s biggest fights around renewable energy
1. San Diego County, California – The battery backlash just got stronger after the city of Escondido, California, indefinitely banned permits to the entire sector in reaction to a battery fire last month.
2. Waldo County, Maine – The potential first floating offshore wind assembly site in America is now one step further in the permitting process, after Maine’s Department of Transportation released a pre-application alternatives analysis required for federal environmental reviews.
3. Dickinson County, Kansas – This one county may be a bellwether for future problems in Kansas, a state with many existing wind farms — and even more potential — but also a lot of opposition.
4. Washoe County, Nevada – The company behind the Burning Man festival will be acquiring nearby geothermal energy leases, in a settlement resolving litigation that had the high-profile naturalist escape challenging access to a renewable energy resource.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In North Carolina, the Kerr Lake Solar project proposed by Cypress Creek Renewables is facing its own apparent local onslaught at community meetings.
In California, Capstone and Eurowind Energy are seeking permission to build a long-duration battery storage facility in Alameda County.
In New Jersey, a coalition of shore towns and opposition groups fighting the EDF-Shell Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm have issued a new missive criticizing state financial benefits to the project.
In New York, the town of Oyster Bay looks like it’ll be extending its moratorium on BESS for at least another six months.
In Pennsylvania, a Pivot Energy solar farm also has some local organizing in the way.