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If you want to decarbonize concrete, it helps to understand the incredible scale of the problem.
To say that concrete poses a decarbonization challenge would be an understatement. Cement production alone is responsible for somewhere between 5 and 10% of global CO2 emissions [0], roughly two to four times more than aviation, a fact that even the construction industry is finally coming to grips with.
And yet the real problem with decarbonizing concrete isn’t the scale of its emissions, it’s the scale of concrete itself. There is simply a preposterous amount of the stuff. Contemplating concrete is like contemplating the universe — awesome, in the old God-fearing definition of the word.
Before we get into the jaw-dropping amount of concrete we produce every year, it’s worth briefly discussing how the stuff is made, and thus where its emissions come from.
Concrete is formed by mixing together cement (mostly calcium silicates), aggregates (such as sand and gravel), and water into a liquid slurry. The cement reacts with the water, forming a paste that binds the mixture into a single solid mass. Beyond concrete’s high strength and low cost, it’s these liquid beginnings that make concrete so useful. It can easily be formed into any shape and leveled with the help of gravity so you can walk on it or park a car 10 stories up on it. Essentially all modern concrete is also reinforced with steel bars, which provide tensile strength and arrest cracks.
So what about the emissions? Roughly 70-90% of the embodied carbon in concrete comes from manufacturing just the cement [1]. Partly this is because making cement is an energy-intensive process — limestone and clay are put into a kiln and heated around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s also because the chemical reaction that turns the limestone into cement (known as calcination) releases CO₂ as a byproduct. Roughly 50-60% of cement’s carbon emissions are due to calcination [2], and thus wouldn’t be addressed by moving to less carbon-intensive electricity sources, like green hydrogen.
Now for the good stuff. Again, the most important thing to understand about concrete is the scale of its production. The world produces somewhere around 4.25 billion metric tons of cement annually (though estimates vary) [3], which works out to about 30 billion tons of concrete produced each year [4].
How much are 30 billion tons?
One way of looking at it is we produce around 4 metric tons, or just under 60 cubic feet (roughly a cube 4 feet on a side), of concrete for each person on the planet each year.
Another way of looking at it is to consider the total amount of mass, full stop, that civilization ingests each year. Estimates here vary quite a bit, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of 100 billion tons [5]. So of the total volume of material that gets extracted and used each year — including all mining, all oil drilling, all agriculture and tree harvesting — around 30% of it by mass goes toward making concrete. The amount of concrete produced each year exceeds the weight of all the biomass we use annually, and all the fossil fuels we use annually.
Total civilization annual material extraction, via Krausmann et al 2018. This is up to 2015, and has now exceeded over 90 Gt/year, with another ~8 Gt/year of recycled material.
Another way of looking at it is that the total mass of all plants on Earth is around 900 billion metric tons. So at current rates of production, it would take about 30 years to produce enough concrete to exceed all the Earth’s plant (dry) biomass.
Because humans have been producing concrete for a while, and because concrete tends to last a long time, we seem to be on the cusp of this happening. Elhacham et al 2020 estimate that total human-created mass (roughly half of which is concrete) reached the total weight of all Earth’s biomass sometime in 2020. Eyeballing their graph, concrete alone will exceed the total weight of all biomass sometime around 2040.
Anthropogenic mass vs biomass during the 20th century, via Elhacham et al 2020
In a pure mass-flow sense, human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel (and to a lesser extent bricks and asphalt).
So civilization uses a lot of concrete. Where is it all going?
China, mostly. In recent history, China has been responsible for roughly half the world’s cement production, and by implication, concrete use [6]. The U.S., by comparison, only uses 2%, with Europe using another 5%.
Cement production by region, via Sanjuan et al 2020. Since cement production roughly tracks consumption (see here and here), we can also use this as a rough guide toward where concrete is used. Note that this gives yet another value for total global cement production of 4.65 Gt
Here’s another view from around 2010, showing what this has looked like over time (data after 2010 is a projection).
Cement consumption by region, via Altwair 2010
This gets summarized in the oft-repeated statistic that China used more cement in three years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
But since China has a much larger population than the U.S., we can get a more intuitive understanding of this by looking at cement consumption per capita. Here’s per capita consumption sometime around 2015:
Per capita cement consumption by country, via Globbulk
We see that the official numbers from China make it a huge outlier in cement consumption, using around eight times as much per capita as the U.S. However, in per capita terms, some Middle Eastern countries exceed it. Saudi Arabia is higher, and Qatar, which is somewhere over 2,000 kg/capita, is so high it doesn’t even show up on the graph. It’s the combination of China’s huge population and its huge per-capita consumption that make it such an outlier in concrete production.
The official Chinese numbers are so huge, in fact, that some analysts suspect that they’re inflated, either by manipulating the data or by producing construction projects that don’t have actual demand (or both). The graph above also includes a more “realistic” estimate (which is still 3x as high as U.S. per-capita use).
What does all this concrete construction mean in practical terms? Well, China has somewhere around 50-60% of the floor space per capita as the U.S. does, or roughly as much living space per capita as most European countries [7]. This is the result of a massive trend toward urbanization over the last quarter century. Urbanization rates went from around 25% in 1990 to 60% in 2017, a period in which China’s population also increased by 250 million. In other words, in less than 30 years over 550 million moved into Chinese cities, and they all needed somewhere to live. By building enormous numbers of concrete high rises, in under 20 years China quintupled its urban residential floor space and doubled its residential floor space overall.
Residential floor space in China over time, via Pan 2020
Beyond China, we see high per capita rates of cement use in the rest of Southeast Asia, as well as the Middle East [8].
One reason you see this volume of concrete use in lower-income, urbanizing countries is that concrete construction is comparatively labor-intensive to produce. The materials for concrete are extremely cheap, and much of its cost in high-cost labor countries (such as the U.S.) is from the labor to produce it — building and setting up the formwork, laying out the reinforcing, placing the embeds, etc. If you’re a country with a lot of low-cost labor, this is a pretty good trade-off.
In addition to the current largest users of concrete, one trend to keep an eye on long-term is India’s concrete use. If India ever proceeds on a path of mass urbanization similar to China (as some folks speculate it will), we could see a massive uptick in global concrete output — India’s urbanization rate of 34% is around where China was in the late 1990s. A shift in India toward a per capita cement consumption more consistent with the rest of Southeast Asia (say around 600 kg/capita) would increase worldwide cement consumption by about 13%, and it does seem as if India’s cement use is trending upward.
By contrast, one thing clear from this data is that the U.S. actually uses an unusually low amount of concrete. Per capita, it uses as little as any other Western country, and far, far less than some — like, surprisingly, Belgium.
So we’ve seen where it gets used in the world. Can we go deeper and look at specifically what concrete is being used for?
This will vary significantly depending on the region and the local construction tradition. In the U.S., we have roughly the following breakdown (via the Portland Cement Association):
Overall, roughly half of our concrete gets used in buildings — about 26% goes into residential buildings, 2% in public buildings, and 16% into commercial buildings. The other half gets used for infrastructure — streets and highways, water conveyance and treatment tanks, etc. Because most construction in the U.S. is just one- or two-story buildings (mostly wood for residential buildings and steel for commercial ones), concrete in buildings is probably mostly going into foundations, slabs on grade, and concrete over metal deck, though there’s probably a substantial amount going into concrete masonry units as well.
But the U.S. has a somewhat unusual construction tradition, where the vast majority of our residential construction, both single-family homes and multifamily apartments, is built from light-framed wood. In other places, it's much more common to use concrete. For instance, the U.K. uses closer to 80% of its concrete for buildings, with most of that going toward the superstructure, the concrete frame that holds the building up. China, which has urbanized on the back of huge numbers of concrete residential high rises, probably devotes an even larger share of its concrete to residential construction.
Understanding how much concrete the world uses, and where it’s being used, is important if you want to use less of it.
The scale of the industry is particularly important to keep in mind. For instance, you often see enthusiasm for the idea of replacing concrete buildings with mass timber ones. But assuming you could substitute all the world’s concrete for an equal volume of wood [9], you’d need to more than triple the total annual volume of global wood harvested [10], which puts a somewhat different spin on the issue.
Most other materials would have emissions as bad or worse than concrete if they were used on the same scale.
Consider, for instance, railway ties. In the U.S., these are still largely made out of wood, but in many places they have been replaced with concrete ties. And some places are considering changing from concrete ties to plastic composite rail ties instead. It’s hard to know the exact embodied emissions without a lot of specific details about the materials and supply chains used, but can we ballpark how much a plastic tie uses compared to a concrete one?
Per the Inventory of Carbon and Energy database, concrete varies between 150 and 400 kg of embodied CO2 per cubic meter, depending on the properties of the mix, with an “average” value of about 250. Plastics mostly have embodied emissions of about 3-4 kg of CO2 per kg of plastic, or about 3,500 kg per cubic meter (assuming a density of about 1,000 kg per cubic meter). So per unit volume, plastic has somewhere around 10 times the embodied emissions of concrete.
We can also do a more direct comparison. Consider a beam spanning around 20 feet and supporting a vertical load of 21,000 pounds per linear foot. The lightest U.S. standard steel section that will span this distance is a W16x26, which weighs about 236 kg and will have embodied carbon emissions of around 354 kg.
A concrete beam of the same depth, supporting the same load and spanning the same distance, will be 10.5 inches wide by 16 inches deep, with three #10 steel bars running along the bottom. This beam will have about 190 kg of embodied emissions from the concrete, and about another 230 kg of embodied emissions from the steel rebar. This is about 20% more than the steel beam, but in the same ballpark — and over half the “concrete” emissions are actually due to the embedded reinforcing steel.
This is arguably a nonrepresentative example (most concrete, such as in columns or slabs, will have a much lower ratio of steel), but the basic logic holds: Concrete is unusual in its total volume of use, not how emissions-heavy it is as a material. Most material substitutes that aren’t wood, recycled materials, or industrial byproducts that can be had for “free” won’t necessarily be much better when used at the same scale. In some ways, it’s surprising that the carbon emissions from concrete are as low as they are.
Of course, this calculus is likely to change over time — as electricity sources change over to lower carbon ones, you’re likely to see the embodied emissions of materials drop along with it. And since cement releases CO2 as part of the chemical process of producing it, concrete will look increasingly worse compared to other materials over time.
One potential option is to find ways of changing the cement production process to be less carbon-intensive. The easiest option is to just replace manufactured Portland Cement with some other cementitious material. Industrial byproducts such as blast furnace slag, silica fume, and fly ash, often have cementitious properties and don’t have a “carbon penalty” (since they’d be produced regardless.) Materials like these can potentially eliminate large volumes of cement in a concrete mix, and they’re a key part of current low-carbon concrete strategies — even “normal” concrete mixes tend to utilize these to some degree. But the total volume of these materials is limited by the extent of various industrial processes. And for things like fly ash (which is a byproduct from coal plants) and slag (which is a byproduct from CO2-emitting blast furnaces), we can expect production to decline over time.
Another option is to take advantage of the fact that concrete will naturally absorb CO2 over time, a process known as carbonation. Even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life. Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt, and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO₂ during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.
It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete carbon emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, Construction Physics, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
[0] - This figure varies depending on the source. Chatham House provides a frequently cited estimate of 8%. We can also ballpark it — roughly 0.93 pounds of CO₂ gets emitted for each pound of cement produced, around 4.25 billion tons of cement are produced annually, which gets ~3.95 billion tons of CO₂, and total annual CO₂ emissions are in the neighborhood of 46 billion tons, getting us a bit less than 9%.
[1] - Per Circular Ecology, ~70-90% of emissions are from the cement production process, depending on the type of concrete and what the rest of the supply chain looks like.
[2] - This seems to vary depending on where the cement is being made — in Myanmar, for instance, it’s around 46%.
[3] - Another number where the sources often don’t agree with each other, see here, here, and here for estimates on annual cement production.
[4] - Concrete is roughly 10-15% cement by weight, depending on the strength of the mix, what other cementitious materials are being used, etc. An average value of 12.5% yields 34 billion tons, which we’ll knock down to account for other uses of cement (masonry mortar, grout, gypsum overlay, etc.) This roughly tracks with estimates from PCA (“4 tons of concrete produced each year for every person on Earth”), and from the now-defunct Cement Sustainability Initiative, which estimated 25 billion tons of concrete against 3.125 billion tons of cement in 2015.
[5] - See here, here, and here for an estimate of total civilization mass flow. This doesn’t (I believe) include waste byproducts, which can be substantial — for instance, it doesn’t include the ~46 billion tons of CO₂ emitted each year, or the 16 billion tons of mine tailings, or the 140 billion tons of agriculture byproducts (though this last number is difficult to verify and seems high).
[6] - We see something similar with cement as we do with other bulky, low-value materials, in that it's made in lots of distributed manufacturing facilities relatively close to where it’s used. See here for a map of cement plants in the U.S. around 2001, for instance.
[7] - For China’s total floor space, see here (most sources seem to agree with these numbers). For U.S. floor space, see my Every Building In America article. For per-capita living space in Europe, see here.
[8] - The often high rates of cement use by middle-income countries have led some folks to develop a U-shaped cement consumption theory of industrial development — that countries start out using a small amount of cement, use more as they get richer and build up their physical infrastructure, and then eventually transition to using lower volumes of cement again. The Globbulk paper spends considerable time debunking this.
[9] - It’s not actually obvious to me what the substitution ratio would be. In strength-governed cases, you’d need proportionally more timber than concrete, but in other cases (such as replacing concrete walls with light-framed stud walls), you’d probably use less. Obviously, you can’t substitute all concrete for wood, but you can probably switch out more than you think — there’s no reason you couldn’t use wood foundations instead of concrete ones in many cases, for instance.
[10] - 30 billion tons of concrete is roughly 12.5 billion cubic meters, and total annual wood products produced is currently around 5.5 billion cubic meters.
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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.