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If there’s one climate policy you’re likely to hear about in the debt ceiling deal, it’s the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
The 304-mile pipeline, which will link West Virginia’s booming gas fields to the East Coast and Texas, essentially received automatic approval under the bipartisan deal. The bill compels federal agencies to approve the pipeline and then shields those permits from judicial review, all but guaranteeing the project’s eventual completion.
If nothing else, the deal brings the saga over the Mountain Valley Pipeline to a close almost a year after it began: The White House initially agreed to support the project last year in exchange for Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s support for Biden’s climate law. But neither Manchin nor Biden could get a bill containing the pipeline through Congress last year as part of a larger package of permitting reforms. Manchin persevered, and the pipeline wriggled into the deal over the weekend thanks to House Republicans and oil-and-gas lobbyists. Manchin, it seems, finally has his pipeline.
The project isn’t the most important climate item in the deal. That distinction has to go to the deal’s preservation of the Inflation Reduction Act, which will ensure hundreds of billions of dollars go to clean energy and infrastructure over the next decade. Nor is it the deal’s worst blow to the climate: As I wrote yesterday, Democrats’ failure to secure any power-grid reform takes that title.
Yet the Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, is the item that environmental groups have focused on the most. “Allowing this deal to advance sets a dangerous precedent,” Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s executive director, said in a statement. “We can pay America’s bills without undermining bedrock environmental protections or fast tracking the fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline.”
So I was curious: How big a deal is the MVP? When completed, it will transmit 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day: What does that actually mean for the country’s natural gas transmission?
Well, here’s a potentially helpful chart:
Energy Information Administration/Heatmap
This is the Energy Information Administration’s chart of new natural-gas pipeline capacity from 1995 to 2022 with my addition. I’ve added the MVP’s capacity at the right. As you can see, the MVP alone will add more pipeline capacity than the entire U.S. added last year — but that’s partially because the country added much less capacity in 2022 than it has in any year since records began in 1995.
I’ll be honest that the chart helps me think more clearly about the project, but not in a way that’s easy to describe. The Mountain Valley Pipeline is a medium-largeish pipeline — big enough to single-handedly expand the country’s ability to move natural gas, but not so big that it will change the fundamental trend that fewer new pipelines are getting built every year.
The MVP’s most important effect may not be its size, but its strategic location: By connecting the productive Utica and Marcellus shale fields in Appalachia to the Transcontinental pipeline, a massive backbone conduit that links New Jersey to the Rio Grande Valley, it will make it easier for cheap natural gas to reach the population centers — and export terminals — of the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast. That will, in turn, spur a modest increase in natural-gas drilling, which could increase American emissions by roughly 6 to 16 million metric tons a year, according to an estimate from The Washington Post.
The Inflation Reduction Act, by comparison, will eliminate roughly 660 million tons a year by 2030. So preserving the IRA is worth the carbon cost of this pipeline — but it would be better, of course, not to have to make such a choice at all.
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Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.
And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.
2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.
3. Biden’s parting words – The Biden administration has finished its long-awaited guidance for the IRA’s tech-neutral electricity credit (which barely changed) and hydrogen production credit.