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On the Paris Agreement, monarch butterflies, and a slumbering polar bear
Current conditions: Forest fires are under control in Chile’s Viña del Mar, but continue to burn in other parts of the country • Los Angeles recorded at least 475 mudslides due to the atmospheric river • It’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Naples, Florida, where a 9-acre beachfront retreat just hit the housing market for a record-breaking $295 million.
Temperatures on Earth have been more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for a year, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). New data shows that from February 2023 through January 2024, the average global temperature was 1.52 degrees Celsius higher than the 1850-1900 baseline. Last month was also the warmest January ever recorded, C3S confirmed. In 2015, 196 nations adopted the legally binding Paris Agreement with the long-term goal of limiting the global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally below 1.5 degrees. A one-year breach doesn’t mean the target is bust, because it “refers to long-term warming – the IPCC uses 20 to 30 years – not annual temperatures that include the short-term influence of natural fluctuations in the climate, such as El Niño,” explainedCarbon Brief. However, some experts, including the new chief of the World Meteorological Organization, believe the rate of warming is speeding up.
C3S
In case you missed it: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rolled out new air pollution rules yesterday, cracking down on dangerous particulate matter. Previously, the EPA’s annual standard for concentrations of particulate matter was 12 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3). Based on epidemiological research showing that this standard did not adequately protect public health, the agency has now lowered the standard to 9 µg/m3. The rules are expected to prevent 4,500 premature deaths per year by 2032. The EPA also updated its Air Quality Index in conjunction with the new rules, which could mean that even as the air gets cleaner, you might get more air quality alerts, reported Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo.
Heat, drought, and pesticides and herbicides are taking a toll on the monarch butterfly population. Numbers of the iconic orange butterflies in Mexico, where they spend the winter, fell by 59% this year to their second lowest level ever recorded, The Associated Press reported. Extreme weather, logging, and chemical treatments are all hurting the insects’ natural habitat and killing the milkweed plant on which they lay their eggs. “It has a lot to do with climate change,” said Gloria Tavera, director of Mexico’s Commission for National Protected Areas. The monarchs’ migration path is the longest of any insect species known to science: They winter in Mexico and then head north to Canada. No single butterfly survives the entire trek; instead their offspring finish it for them, before turning around and heading back to Mexico to start the process over again.
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Danish energy developer Orsted said yesterday that it had lost a ton of money on its experiment trying to build wind farms in the United States, and planned to take on way less risk going forward. The figures are pretty grim, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported: Orsted had 9.6 billion Danish kroner worth of fees (about $1.4 billion) related to one New Jersey project, Ocean Wind 1, and had booked $4 billion of losses, most of which were due to Ocean Wind 1’s cancellation. Overall, it reported a loss of almost $3 billion in 2023. Orsted also said it was pulling out of Norway, Spain, and Portugal. In a call with analysts, the company’s chief executive Mads Nipper said that Orsted will spend far less money on projects before making the final approval to go forward with construction.
Convincing people to change their habits and beliefs is very hard, but when it comes to the climate crisis, widespread behavioral shifts are essential. A new “global megastudy” of more than 59,000 participants across 63 countries attempted to figure out which “interventions” can be most effective at shifting beliefs and getting people to support climate policy. The results, published in Science Advances, show that the act of writing a letter to future generations was “one of the top interventions tested.” Participants had to pen a note to a hypothetical child who will be turning 30 in the year 2055, detailing what they’re doing now to help keep the planet healthy. This exercise was the most effective intervention at nudging people toward supporting climate mitigation policies.
Nima Sarikhani / Wildlife Photographer of the Year
“Ice Bed,” by Nima Sarikhani, is the winner of the 2023 Wildlife Photographer of the Year 59 People's Choice Award. The picture shows a male polar bear drifting off to sleep on a small iceberg off the Svalbard archipelago. “I hope that this photograph also inspires hope,” Sarikhani said. “There is still time to fix the mess we have caused.” The competition is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London.
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On the fallout from the LA fires, Trump’s tariffs, and Tesla’s sales slump
Current conditions: A record-breaking 4 feet of snow fell on the Japanese island of Hokkaido • Nearly 6.5 feet of rain has inundated northern Queensland in Australia since Saturday • Cold Arctic air will collide with warm air over central states today, creating dangerous thunderstorm conditions.
President Trump yesterday agreed to a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but went ahead with an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports. China retaliated with new levies on U.S. products including fuel – 15% for coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% for crude oil – starting February 10. “Chinese firms are unlikely to sign new long-term contracts with proposed U.S. projects as long as trade tensions remain high,” notedBloomberg. “This is bad news for those American exporters that need to lock in buyers before securing necessary financing to begin construction.” Trump recently ended the Biden administration’s pause on LNG export permits. A December report from the Department of Energy found that China was likely to be the largest importer of U.S. LNG through 2050, and many entities in China had already signed contracts with U.S. export projects. Trump is expected to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
Insurance firm State Farm is looking to hike insurance rates for homeowners in California by 22% after the devastating wildfires that tore through Los Angeles last month. The company, which is the largest insurer in California, sent a letter to the state’s insurance commissioner, asking for its immediate approval to increase home insurance by 22% for homeowners, 15% for tenants and renters, and 38% for “rental dwelling” in order to “help protect California’s fragile insurance market.” So far, the firm has received more than 8,700 claims and paid out more than $1 billion, but it expects to pay more. “Insurance will cost more for customers in California going forward because the risk is greater in California,” the company said yesterday. “Higher risks should pay more for insurance than lower risks.” A report out this week found that climate change is expected to shave $1.5 trillion off of U.S. home values by 2055 as insurance rates rise to account for the growing risk of extreme weather disasters.
A new report outlines pathways to decarbonizing the buildings sector, which produces about one-third of global emissions. The analysis, from the Energy Transitions Commission, proposes three main priorities that need to be tackled:
“This will require collaboration right across sector, between governments, industry bodies, and private companies,” said Stephen Hill, a sustainability and building performance expert at building design firm Arup. “We need to be ambitious, but if we get it right we can cut carbon, generate value for our economy, and improve people’s quality of life through action like improving living conditions and reducing fuel poverty.”
Energy Transitions Commission
Fracking executive Chris Wright was confirmed yesterday as the new Energy Secretary. Wright is the CEO of the oilfield services firm Liberty Energy (though he has said he plans to step down) and a major Republican donor. He has a history of climate denialism. “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year. Although during his confirmation hearings, he struck a different tone, avowing that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons. He expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear. Wright will be tasked with executing President Trump’s planned overhaul of U.S. energy policy, and expansion of domestic energy production. The Department of Energy has a $50 billion budget and is also in charge of maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
A few new reports find Tesla is seeing sales drops in some key markets, possibly due to CEO Elon Musk’s push into politics. In California, Tesla registrations fell by about 12% last year, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, and the company’s EV market share in the state fell by 7.6%, while Kia, Hyundai, and Honda all made decent gains. “While high interest rates, tough competition, and the introduction of a restyled Model 3 sedan hurt the EV maker’s sales in California, the loss of business was likely exacerbated by Elon Musk’s involvement in the U.S. election,” Reutersreported. Tesla is also running into trouble across the pond, where Musk has been meddling in European politics, throwing his weight behind far-right parties. In the European Union, Tesla registrations fell 13% last year, but dropped 41% in Germany, the bloc’s biggest BEV market. Last month, Tesla registrations dropped by about 63% in France, 44% in Sweden, and 38% in Norway.
Researchers have developed a new variety of rice that has a higher crop yield than other varieties, but emits 70% less methane.
Artificial intelligence may extend coal’s useful life, but there’s no saving it.
Appearing by video connection to the global plutocrats assembled recently at Davos, Donald Trump interrupted a rambling answer to a question about liquefied natural gas to proclaim that he had come up with a solution to the energy demand of artificial intelligence (“I think it was largely my idea, because nobody thought this was possible”), which is to build power plants near data centers to power them. And a key part of the equation should be coal. “Nothing can destroy coal — not the weather, not a bomb — nothing,” he said. “But coal is very strong as a backup. It’s a great backup to have that facility, and it wouldn’t cost much more — more money. And we have more coal than anybody.”
There is some truth there — the United States does in fact have the largest coal reserves in the world — and AI may be offering something of a lifeline to the declining industry. But with Trump now talking about coal as a “backup,” it’s a reminder that he brings up the subject much less often than he used to. Even if coal will not be phased out as an electricity source quite as quickly as many had hoped or anticipated, Trump’s first-term promise to coal country will remain a broken one.
Yet in an unusual turn of events, the anticipated explosion of demand for electricity on its way over the next few years has led some utilities to scale back their existing plans to shutter coal-fired power plants, foreseeing that they’ll need every electron they can generate. Ironically, especially in Georgia, that need is driven by a boom in green manufacturing.
Nevertheless, coal’s decline is still remarkable. At the start of the 21st century, coal was the primary source of electricity generation in 32 states; now that number is down to 10 and dropping. As recently as 2007, coal accounted for half the country’s electricity; the figure is now 16%. Worldwide coal demand keeps increasing, mostly because of China and India. But here in the United States, the trajectory is only going in one direction.
Confronted with those facts, a politician could take one of two basic paths. The first is to make impossible promises to voters in coal country, telling them that the jobs that have disappeared will be brought back, their communities will be revitalized, and the dignity they feel they have lost will be returned.
That was the path Donald Trump took. He talked a lot about coal in 2016, making grand promises about the coal revival he would bring if elected. At a rally in West Virginia, he donned a hardhat, pretended to shovel some coal, and said, “For those miners, get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off.” And in Trumpian style, if he couldn’t keep the promise, he’d just say he did. “The coal industry is back,” he said in 2018, a year which saw the second-most coal capacity retired in the country’s history to that point. “We’re putting our great coal miners back to work,” he said on the campaign trail in 2020, when the number of coal-producing mines in the U.S. declined by 18%.
When Trump took office in January 2017, there were just over 50,000 coal jobs left in the country after decades of decline. When he left office in 2021, the number was down to 38,000. The number is slightly higher today at around 43,000, but it’s still infinitesimal as a portion of the economy.
Trump’s failure to bring back coal jobs wasn’t because his affection for the fuel source was insincere. He certainly had as coal-friendly an administration as one could imagine; his second pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency was a coal lobbyist. But the triumvirate of forces that drove those job reductions — automation, emissions-limiting regulations, and competition from fracked natural gas — were irresistible.
The second path for a politician confronting the structural decline of coal is to take concrete steps to create new opportunities in coal country that offer people a better economic future. That was what the Biden administration tried to do. As part of its clean energy push, Biden put a particular focus on siting new projects in underserved communities, including in areas where coal still defines the culture even though the jobs are long gone. The administration also directed hundreds of millions of dollars in funding “to ensure former coal communities can take full advantage of the clean energy transition and continue their leading role in powering our nation,” in the words of then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Or as the Treasury Department put it, the administration was working “to strengthen the economies of coal communities and other areas that have experienced underinvestment in past decades.” These were real commitments, backed up by real dollars.
Today, the new Trump administration is committed to freezing, reversing, and clawing back as much of Biden’s clean energy agenda as it can. Whether that includes these investments in coal country remains to be seen.
There’s good reason to believe it will, however, both because of the antipathy Trump and his team hold for anything that has Biden’s fingerprints on it, and because Trump understands the fundamental truth of his political relationship to coal country: Its support for him is unshakeable, no matter the policy outcome.
Take just one example: Harlan County, Kentucky, site of the extraordinary 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, which chronicled a strike by miners demanding fair wages and working conditions. Coal is still being mined in Harlan County, but as of 2023, only 577 people there were employed in the industry, or about one in every 19 working-age people in the county. It remains overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly poor — and the voters there love Trump. He got 84.9% of the vote in 2016, 85.4% in 2020, and 87.7% in 2024.
It might be fair to ask what people in Harlan County and across coal country have to show for their support for the president. The absolute best he can offer them is that while coal will continue to decline under his presidency, it might decline a bit slower than it otherwise would have. Even if escalating electricity demand offers an opportunity for the coal industry, there’s little reason to believe it will reverse coal’s decline in America. At most it could flatten the curve, allowing some coal plants to remain in operation a few years longer than planned.
A future where coal is at most a miniscule part of America’s energy mix with a tiny labor force producing it seems inevitable. Most people in coal country understand that, as much as they might like it to be otherwise. If only their favorite politician would admit it to them — and commit to offering them more than fables — they could start building something better.
Companies, states, cities, and other entities with Energy Department contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them have been ordered to stop all work.
Amidst the chaos surrounding President Trump’s pause on infrastructure and climate spending, another federal funding freeze is going very much under the radar, undermining energy and resilience projects across the U.S. and its territories.
Days after Trump took office, acting Energy Secretary Ingrid Kolb reportedly told DOE in a memo to suspend any work “requiring, using, or enforcing Community Benefit Plans, and requiring, using, or enforcing Justice40 requirements, conditions, or principles” in any loan or loan guarantee, any grant, any cost-sharing agreement or any “contracts, contract awards, or any other source of financial assistance.” The memo stipulated this would apply to “existing” awards, grants, contracts and other financial assistance, according to E&E News’ Hannah Northey, who first reported the document’s existence.
Justice40 was Biden’s signature environmental justice initiative. Community benefit plans were often used by Biden’s DOE to strengthen the potential benefits that projects could have on surrounding local economies and were seen as a vehicle for environmental justice. When we say often, we mean it: some high profile examples of these plans include those used for the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant restart in Michigan and the agency’s battery materials processing and recycling awards.
After Kolb’s edict went out, companies, states, cities, and other entities with DOE contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them were ordered to stop all work, according to multiple letters to contract recipients reviewed by Heatmap News. “Recipients and subrecipients must cease any activities, including contracted activities, and stop incurring costs associated with DEI and CBP activities effective as of the date of this letter,” one letter reads, adding: “Costs incurred after the date of this letter will not be reimbursed.”
One such letter was posted by the University of Michigan research department in an advisory notice. The department’s website summarizes the letter as “directing the suspension” of all work tied to “any source of DOE funding” if it in any way involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs,” as well as Justice40 requirements and community benefits plans.
These letters state companies and other entities with community benefit plans in their contracts or otherwise involved in their funding awards would be contacted by DOE to make “modifications” to their contracts. They only cite President Trump’s executive orders that purportedly address Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices; they do not cite a much-debated Office of Management and Budget memo freezing all infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act spending, which has been challenged in federal court. It is altogether unclear if any outcome of the OMB memo litigation is even relevant to this other freeze.
We reached out to the Energy Department about these letters for comment on how many entities may be impacted and why they targeted community benefit plans. We will update this story if we hear back.
A lot is still murky about this situation. It is unclear how many entities have been impacted and the totality of the impacts may be unknown for a while, because a lot of these entities supposed to get money may want to keep fighting privately to, well, still get their money. It’s also hazy if all entities that received these letters are continuing to do any construction or preparatory work or other labor connected to their funding not tied to the community benefit planning, or just halting the funded labor altogether.
The blast radius from this freeze is hard to parse, said Matthew Tejada, a former EPA staffer who most recently served as the agency’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice under the Biden administration. Tejada, who now works for the advocacy group NRDC and remains connected to advocates in the environmental justice space, said he was very much aware of this separate freeze when he was first reached by Heatmap. But “unless you’re able to really have a network of information bottom up from the recipients, it’s a bit of a black box we’re operating around because we’re not going to get transparency and information from the administration.“
“Part of their obvious strategy here is to create enough confusion as possible to make defending as difficult as possible. But I’m fairly certain the community and various others here -- local governments, tribes -- will have plenty to say about cutting through that chaos to make sure the will of Congress and the outcomes of these programs and projects are delivered upon.” He believes that any attempts to modify these contract awards “on the pretext of canceling the contract[s] will in all likelihood meet a legal challenge.”
But the ripple effects of this other freeze are starting to surface in local news accounts.
According to the Erie Times-News, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania currently cannot access funding for a city-wide audit for home energy efficiency. And a big road improvement project in the Mariana Islands – a U.S. territory – was nearly derailed by the freeze, according to the news outlet Mariana’s Variety, which reported project developers are just going to try and move forward without the remaining money provided under contract.
We’ll have to wait and see the breadth of the impacts here and whether this freeze will produce its own legal or regulatory rollercoaster. Hang on tight.