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The United Nations has published its first report card on the world’s progress meeting the climate goals under the Paris Agreement.
Although the agency doesn’t give a letter grade, the overwhelming message is clear: The world is not a pleasure to have in class. Countries are still failing to hit the goals that they set for themselves under the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Despite recent climate initiatives and new laws in the United States, China, and Europe, the world is not on track to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And it is nowhere close to keeping average temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees, which has become a threshold for near-term climate danger.
The new assessment captures something important but often overlooked about the Paris Agreement. The treaty is largely nonbinding: It imposes no pollution-related restrictions on its members. But what it prescribes, instead, is a process. For the first time ever, that process is about to enter a new stage.
Here is how the Paris process works: Every five years, each country must submit a detailed pledge saying how much it will cut its greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come. (These are called “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs.) A few years after that, the world engages in a “global stocktaking,” a review of how much progress has been made toward those goals and how far off humanity is from its climate goals. Then two years later, each country submits a new, more ambitious plan.
The 2023 UN climate conference, which will happen in Dubai, will see the first of these “global stocktakes.” It is meant to set the stage for 2025, when countries will formally update their Paris Agreement plans.
Last week’s report is written largely in UN-ese, a somewhat bland series of pledges and phrases that leave one with the impression that somebody should do something about all the emissions. It emphasizes that “radical decarbonization” is now needed, which will involve a rapid scale-up of renewable energy, the broad electrification of transport, and a phase-out of all “unabated” fossil fuels.
But perhaps most importantly, the report contains a helpful graph that dramatizes just how far the world remains from its most ambitious climate goals.
Courtesy of the United Nations
There are a few lessons in this chart:
Meeting the Paris Agreement goals will be extremely difficult. Since 1850, the world has steadily put more and more carbon pollution into the air every year. Decade after decade, that trend line has only ever gone up. In 2023, roughly 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide — or about 110 trillion pounds — will stream into the atmosphere from human-related activities.
Yet to meet the Paris Agreement goals, that two-century mega-trend must not only end, but almost immediately reverse itself. To have the best chance of hitting the Paris targets, global greenhouse-gas emissions must peak by the end of 2025 — scarcely more than two years away.
As soon as emissions peak, they must fall precipitously. In order to hit the 1.5 degree goal, for instance, annual global carbon pollution must fall by 48% by 2030, compared to its 2019 level.
Even the world’s most ambitious climate pledges still won’t meet the Paris Agreement goals. The world has made tremendous progress since 2010, when climate change looked likely to cause 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius, equal to about 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming by the end of the century. That would have been catastrophic.
Today, scientists project temperatures to rise to something like 2.5 degrees Celsius, or about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, above their pre-industrial levels.
But that still won’t be enough to hit the Paris goals. Look at the red range in the chart labeled “NDCs,” the plans that countries must submit under the Paris Agreement. Although it’s not in the chart, the text of the report provides details about how much these NDCs will actually reduce emissions.
When you take these NDCs together, they suggest that the world could keep global warming to 2.1 degrees Celsius. And if countries’ long-term targets are taken into account, and the most optimistic assumptions are applied, then global temperatures may rise as little as 1.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
But those long-term plans remain speculative, and an “implementation gap” remains between what the world has promised to do and what its policies actually say will happen. And in any case, even those ambitious plans won’t bring the world to the 1.5-degree goal.
Reducing emissions, on a year-over-year basis, will be even harder. Fossil fuels remain the primary industrial energy input to the global economy. As you can see from the chart, global emissions have never seriously plateaued for any length of time, and they remain largely coupled to the global economy. (The most recent big dip in annual emissions was caused by the Covid recession.)
That’s because almost all energy development is additive: Although we think of types of energy as displacing each other — so that renewables replace natural gas, say, or coal replaced wood fires — humanity has largely added energy capacity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The world burned more coal last year than it ever has before. Although statistics are more scarce, biomass consumption — wood-burning — is said to also be at an all-time high.
There are positive signs. As the report notes, 10- and in some cases 100-fold declines in the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries have seen new renewable technologies get rapidly deployed over the past decade. But the world is not moving fast enough.
And perhaps that’s the most upbeat way to see the report card: The age of planning and innovation has ended, the UN is saying. The world of scaling and deployment is about to begin.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.