Biden Sends a Climate Warning in Farewell Address

Current conditions: Cooler temperatures and calmer winds are helping firefighters make progress against ongoing blazes in Los Angeles • Argentina is bracing for an extreme heat wave • A blast of Arctic air called a “Siberian express” will send temperatures plummeting across central and eastern states this weekend.

THE TOP FIVE

1. New analysis links climate change to LA fires

A new scientific analysis out of the University of California, Los Angeles, concludes that climate change intensified the city’s devastating wildfires. The UCLA researchers estimated that intense heat caused by climate change may be linked to about 25% of the fuel that fed the fires. “We believe that the fires would still have been extreme without the climate change components,” the authors wrote, “but would have been somewhat smaller and less intense.” This analysis is not peer reviewed, and the scientists call for further research. But they add that future wildfire mitigation should focus on “factors we can control,” like stopping people from lighting fires, making homes fire-resistant, and thinking more carefully about where we build.

2. Biden warns that ‘powerful forces’ want to reverse climate progress

President Biden gave a televised farewell speech yesterday from the Oval Office, in which he said that “the existential threat of climate change has never been clearer,” pointing to recent natural disasters like flooding in North Carolina and wildfires in California. He touted his Inflation Reduction Act as “the most significant climate and clean energy law ever, ever in the history of the world,” and said we don’t have to choose between planet and prosperity. But Biden had a warning. Without naming names, he said that “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis to serve their own interests for power and profit.” He added: “We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future.”

This morning a handful of Democratic House Representatives will host a press conference in which they urge their colleagues in Congress to oppose “efforts to roll back policies helping to build a clean energy economy, lower costs, protect public health, and cut climate pollution.”

3. Climate Corps to shut down

The Biden administration has been “quietly winding down” the Climate Corps green jobs program before President-elect Trump takes office, according to Grist. “The people who were responsible for coordinating it have left office or are leaving office,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has been researching climate service projects for AmeriCorps. “Before they go, they are shutting it all down.” But the good news is that because the roles created through the program were scattered across a diverse mix of local and state governments and nonprofits, as well as federal agencies, many of them already have funding locked in and will therefore be able to stick around for a few years. “The jobs survive, even if the branding doesn’t,” wrote Kate Yoder at Grist.

4. Takeaways from DOE nominee Chris Wright’s confirmation hearing

Yesterday’s confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a fracking executive and Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, proved to be relatively low-key and collegial. Wright repeatedly avowed that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, although he demurred that it was a “global” problem and turned his responses repeatedly to energy innovation and developing energy resources in the United States. He lamented that fossil fuels had “fallen out of fashion and out of favor,” but also expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear power. “Wright’s relatively easy reception reflects the fact that there actually are wide areas of bipartisan agreement on the kind of energy research and technology development work the Department of Energy does,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.

Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, also had his confirmation hearing yesterday. He said that drivers of electric vehicles should have to pay to use roads because they don’t pay taxes on fuel.

Other nominees, including Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and Lee Zeldin for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, may endure more contentious hearings today.

5. Shrinking cloud cover may have a cooling effect

Warmer temperatures caused by climate change are reducing low-cloud cover in some parts of the world, and ironically, this may be helping to keep Earth a little bit cooler, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Researchers from McGill University measured the heat energy that Earth reflects into the atmosphere, and noticed that lower cloud cover means more of his heat energy gets released. “Without these cloud changes, the surface would warm even faster,” said Lei Liu, a graduate student in McGill’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and an author on the study. “This work offers observational truth about how clouds affect warming, which can be used to improve climate models and guide environmental policies.” Of course, clouds also help reflect heat before it even reaches Earth’s surface, and a separate piece of research published last month suggested that the decreasing cloud cover is actually making global warming worse. In other words, it’s complicated.

THE KICKER

Natural disasters have been linked to rent hikes between 4% and 6% in affected cities, and in many cases, these elevated prices never fully come down.