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The agenda may change, but ultimately, they’re all about who owes what to whom.
Before it even began, the 29th annual United Nations climate conference, or COP29, was deemed the “Finance COP.” While the name is fitting, it’s also a little absurd.
It’s called the Finance COP because the main item on the agenda at this year’s conference, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, is to set a new annual goal for the amount of money richer countries should deliver to poorer countries to help them fight climate change and respond to its effects. The typically jargon-y name for this task, which the Paris Agreement says must be completed by 2025, is a “New Collective Quantified Goal,” or NCQG for climate finance.
As of this writing, negotiators are still hashing out a final dollar figure, as well as ancillary details like how much of the money should come in the form of grants versus loans versus private investment. It wasn’t until Friday, as the conference was supposed to be wrapping up, that leadership even put a number on the table. That initial number was $250 billion, a fraction of the $1 trillion in public finance that many developing countries have called for. Their reactions were unsurprisingly weary.
“It is incomprehensible that year after year we bring our stories of climate impacts to these meetings and receive only sympathy and no real action from wealthy nations,” Tina Stege, the Marshall Islands Climate Envoy said in a statement. “We are not here to tell stories. We are here to save our communities.”
That “year after year” bit is why it’s somewhat misleading to call this the Finance COP — that is, because every COP is about finance. I don’t mean that in a vague, every-climate-negotiation-is-really-about-money, way. I mean literally, every year, the issue of how much money developed countries should cough up, as well as what the money should be used for and what form it should be in, is intrinsic to the negotiations.
Three years ago in Scotland, at issue was the developed world’s failure to meet an earlier climate finance goal — a promise to deliver $100 billion to developing countries by 2020. It was also that year that developing countries finally got their proposal to create a new “loss and damage” fund to help the most vulnerable countries redress the destruction climate change has already caused, onto the agenda. The next two COPs, in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, were largely focused on the mechanics of setting up this fund and getting more countries to contribute to it.
The annual gathering is like a carousel delegates clamber onto each November. They go round and round on the same handful of issues, rehashing the same arguments. Are countries’ current pledges ambitious enough? Can they up the ante? Can they get more financial assistance to do so? Can they get any closer to agreeing to stop using fossil fuels? Is there too much emphasis on stopping climate change, and not enough on adapting to it? Should China be held accountable to do more? Permeating all of these questions is the big one: What do countries like the U.S., which have done the most to cause climate change, owe the low-lying nations and emerging economies who have done almost nothing to contribute to the crisis but are most exposed to its effects?
Some years one or another issue is higher up on the agenda. By design, the conference follows a pattern of pledge and review. Countries make pledges one year, on finance or emission reductions or adaptation, review those pledges the following year, and then, ideally, get shamed into ratcheting them up the next year. In practice, this ends up playing out via meticulous fights over semantics, like whether countries “should” or “shall” do more. Though the climate plans have not yet been aggressive enough to cap warming below 2 degrees Celsius, let alone to 1.5 degrees, and the financial commitments have not yet risen to the true scale of the costs, each year the delegates do end up staggering off their horses in the final hour having made bigger, bolder promises.
I don’t point this out to detract from the importance of setting a new target for climate finance. While historically most countries have fallen short on even their inadequate promises, there will at least be a number on paper pushing them in an upward direction. But the idea that finance was more important at this conference than it has been at any other or will be next year is nothing more than a narrative device.
This year’s emphasis on finance is one of many weirdnesses that arise from the militantly procedural nature of these talks. Another example is the main event at last year’s conference, the “Global Stocktake,” a formal assessment of collective progress toward achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. Did countries really need to perform this exercise to conclude they were lagging, when dozens of scientific reports are published each year on the topic? Was such a stocktake really necessary to get countries to agree that tackling climate change requires “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” a seemingly obvious conclusion the conference only formally acknowledged for the first time last year?
Perhaps. This year, a group of countries led by Saudi Arabia are trying to take back those essential five words, refusing to allow them to be reiterated in the conference’s final text. The outcome of each COP is always more a negotiation of political will than an honest, science-based compromise, and it may be useful for the conferences to cling to procedure and formality in an effort to rise above the ever-shifting geopolitical landscape.
Still, some think the procedures are ripe for change. A group of prominent global leaders and climate researchers published an open letter last week calling for reforms to the conference, arguing that the current structure “simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.” They suggested prohibiting countries that do not agree with the need to move away from fossil fuels from holding the COP presidency, shifting from annual negotiations with big proclamations to more regular meetings focused on concrete actions, and creating a formal scientific advisory body to “amplify the voice of authoritative science.”
As my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last year, the annual conference is “a pseudo-event, a spectacle that exists partially to be covered in the press.” The Paris Agreement does not govern by fiat but by an iterative process of “naming and shaming,” which, as Meyer wrote, “implies a press to name and a public sphere where the shaming can happen.”
But the banal, Groundhog Day nature of the annual climate talks make it difficult to keep the devastating stakes, which are ever rising, in the foreground. It is the leaders representing those most at risk, such as Cedric Schuster, minister of the Alliance of Small Island States, who repeatedly, desperately, try to keep those stakes in sight.
“After this COP29 ends, we cannot just sail off into the sunset,” Schuster said in a statement on Saturday, as the negotiations became increasingly tense. “We are literally sinking. Understand this — I am not exaggerating when I say our islands are sinking! How can you expect us to go back to the women, men, and children of our countries with a poor deal which will surely plunge them into further peril?”
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.