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June 4 was a busy day for democracy.
Democracy is having a big year — heck, it’s having a big month. More people will vote in 2024 than in any other year in human history, and many of those elections are happening right now: In just the past four days, Mexicans elected a climate scientist to the presidency; Indians braved extreme heat to reelect Prime Minister Narendra Modi; and Donald Trump’s pal Nigel Farage announced his return to the scrum of British politics in the hopes of holding off an historic win by the Labour Party on July 4.
Americans still have another few months of suspense before their own general election, but voting is well underway stateside, too. In Tuesday’s primaries, voters cast ballots for local offices in Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — including in several races with significant implications for the climate.
While the results were a mixed bag, they also speak to the fact that climate change is increasingly unignorable by politicians, and it signals where campaigners and activists should focus their attention as the November election approaches. Here are six of the major takeaways:
What happened: Mariannette Miller-Meeks won the First District Republican primary in Iowa
Why it matters: Miller-Meeks is the head of the House’s Conservative Climate Caucus and has championed wind, solar, and nuclear energy; her opponent, David Pautsch, attacked her for not being conservative enough on issues like abortion, the national debt, and her support of tax credits for carbon pipelines. Though Miller-Meeks’ history isn’t likely to impress too many climate activists — she’s been particularly sympathetic to the liquified natural gas industry, claiming, “If you want a cleaner, healthier planet, the best thing you could do is to export American oil and gas” — her victory over Pautsch in deep-red Iowa proves that being associated with the word “climate” isn’t an automatic black mark against a Republican in 2024. Still, it wasn’t a comfortable victory: Early Tuesday evening, the returns had looked pretty worrying for Miller-Meeks, and the slim margin in some areas suggested the risk of breaking with the party line.
What happened: Democratic voters in New Jersey weren’t convinced by Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, who lost the Eighth Congressional District primary to Rep. Rob Menendez, Jr.
Why it matters: Of all the candidates who ran in contested primaries on Tuesday, none seemed to position themselves more overtly as a climate candidate than Bhalla. As mayor of Hoboken, Bhalla created a Department of Climate Action & Innovation in part to adapt to a future of extreme flooding in the city, has sued Exxon Mobil for climate-related damages, and centered climate as a campaign priority, earning endorsements from environmental groups like the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters and Food & Water Action. While many different factors go into winning — and losing — a campaign (especially in a state like New Jersey), one lesson of the night is that “climate,” at least in so many words, might not be the selling point that progressives sometimes think it is. Case in point: Bhalla’s campaign page on climate framed electrification as a means of reducing the state’s “carbon footprint”; Menendez’s focused mainly on the economy and jobs.
What happened: Tim Sheehy won the Republican Senate primary, setting him up to take on Democrat Jon Tester in one of the most nail-biting races of November
Why it matters: Retired Navy SEAL and aerial firefighter Tim Sheehy overcame a scandal involving a lie about his gunshot wound to take on Tester in a race that could decide the balance of the U.S. Senate — and, by extension, Biden’s climate agenda — in five months’ time. A Trump endorsee, Sheehy is not afraid of a good old-fashioned culture war, as evidenced by Bridger Aerospace, his aerial firefighting company, quietly removing references to environmental, social, and governance issues from its website after Sheehy entered the race. Any mention of climate change? That was gone, too. But Sheehy’s rhetoric during his primary campaign also reeked of the green boogeyman, with the candidate repeatedly using the term “climate cult” to dismiss Tester, Biden, and other perceived enemies. Though Tester, a working farmer, has championed climate-related causes in a way that has resonated even with many Republicans, Sheehy hasn’t yet appeared interested in debating the finer points of things like federal subsidies for going electric. Expect the attacks to get more colorful in the coming months; polls show Sheehy and Tester neck-and-neck.
What happened: Voters in Montana winnowed downa crowded field of six Republican utility board candidates to three finalists
Why it matters: Utility boards are some of the most influential elected bodies that almost nobody pays attention to, and Republicans in red and red-leaning states like Arizona and Alaska tend to hold the edge even in bluer urban areas. In Montana, the Public Service Commission decides the energy mix of the region in and around Billings, Missoula, Bozeman, Helena, and Butte, and has been in Republican hands for two decades. That explains the high level of Republican interest in the primary races on Tuesday, where five candidates played musical chairs for two available seats. The apparent winners — Brad Molnar in District 2 and Jeff Welborn in District 3 (in addition to incumbent commissioner Jennifer Fielder, who ran unopposed) — have hit-and-miss records when it comes to renewable energy. Molnar, who was reelected to the seat he held from 2005 to 2012, told the Montana Free Press he’s concerned about the “xenophobia” of conservatives in his state and has been known to break from party lines in his votes, in addition to voicing some belief in climate change (though he doesn’t say we can do anything about it). Welborn, meanwhile, described himself to the Free Press as a “free market guy” interested in preventing rate hikes with an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy that includes new nuclear plants and hydrogen, though he’s previously sided with the local utility over Montana’s consumer advocate. In November, Welborn will face Leonard “Lenny” Williams, the uncontested Democrat in the race, who’s called the gerrymandered utility board districts a “racket.”
What happened: Angel Charley easily won the New Mexico Democratic primary in Senate District 30, to the west of Albuquerque, on an environmental justice platform
Why it matters: With around 63% of the vote as of Wednesday morning, first-time candidate Angel Charley appeared to be the clear winner in her race against former state Senator Clemente Sanchez. Charley, the former director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, convinced voters in the recently redrawn district that climate goals aren’t different from popular policies like protecting vulnerable women living near extractive industries in their area, and can be pursued with projects like community solar development. As the experts I’ve spoken with have told me, sometimes the best way to move emissions-abating policies forward is by focusing on what climate activists might view more as positive externalities, but are more immediate to the communities in question. Charley’s victory on environmental justice grounds seems like further proof of concept. A Native American activist, Charley’s campaign focused largely on “lessening dependence on oil and gas and extractive industries, because there’s a correlation with violence against Native women when extractive industries are present.” Meanwhile, Sanchez’s campaign was heavily financed by corporate interests, including donations from an oil company, an auto dealer trade group, lobbyists, and utilities.
What happened: 17 out of 19 Republican and Democratic sponsors of a recent bill attempting to block a CO2 pipeline in the state who were up for reelection won their primaries
Why it matters:Located between the shale oil fields of North Dakota and the storage terminals of Texas, South Dakota is no stranger to pipeline proposals. Plans for a new pipeline that would funnel carbon dioxide produced by the local ethanol industry to North Dakota to be stored underground, however, have become a contentious wedge issue in the state and appeared to be behind some of the primary results on Tuesday night. Of the more than a dozen sponsors of a recent failed bill that would have prohibited the use of eminent domain for the construction of pipelines carrying carbon oxide, all but two who ran appeared to have been reelected as of Wednesday morning; some of the state’s losing incumbents, on the other hand, were behind a compromise bill that attempted to split the difference between protecting landowners and allowing the pipeline project to proceed. The slim margins in some races — The South Dakota Searchlight points to Mykala Voita, a landowner rights candidate who beat incumbent Republican Sen. Erin Tobin by 48 votes, within the margin to trigger a recount — speak to the deep divides and disagreements in the state. That also goes for divisions within the major parties about the use of eminent domain and suspicions about the technology of carbon capture and storage more largely.
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What’s a big multinational like Microsoft to do when it wants to build with clean concrete?
Imagine you’re a corporate sustainability exec and your company is planning to build a new data center. You’ve managed to convince the higher-ups to pay extra to use low-carbon building materials, lest the project blow up your brand’s emissions goals. But when you meet with the general contractor hired for the job, they don’t actually know of any low-carbon concrete purveyors in the area. Concrete is a hyper-local industry by necessity — you can’t hold the stuff for more than 90 minutes or so before it hardens and becomes unusable.
So here you are, one of the few people with the power and budget to pay a premium for zero-emissions concrete — a product that must become the standard if we are to stop climate change — and you can’t even get your hands on it.
This is, more or less, the situation Microsoft has found itself in. Last year, the company’s indirect emissions rose 31%, primarily due to the construction of new data centers. Cement, the main ingredient in concrete, is one of the most carbon-intensive materials on the planet, responsible for 6% of global emissions, according to Rhodium Group’s estimate. Low-carbon cement exists and is starting to be manufactured at a small scale, but first movers with deep pockets like Microsoft can’t necessarily access it.
To solve this and help clean cement startups access a bigger pool of buyers, Microsoft is leading the development of a new market for low-carbon cement — what climate finance experts call a “book and claim” market.
The tech giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sublime Systems, a Massachusetts-based cement startup, saying that it will buy “environmental attribute certificates” from Sublime’s first commercial cement plants. Microsoft will “book” the environmental attributes — the greenness, for lack of a better word — of Sublime’s cement, and “claim” those attributes in its own emissions accounting.
Let’s get a collective groan out of the way. Yes, once again, the business community is proposing a sort of carbon credit system as the best way — possibly the only way — to scale climate solutions. These certificates, however, have at least one notable difference from the beleaguered carbon offsets you’ve likely heard so much about: They are tied to a physical product. Microsoft won’t be buying one ton of CO2 avoided or removed from the atmosphere and then subtracting that from its overall emissions ledger. It will be buying the rights to say that it used one ton of cement with a carbon intensity of zero (or whatever the carbon intensity of Sublime’s product ends up being). Instead of neutralizing its cement-related emissions by paying someone to plant trees, it’s doing so by enabling Sublime to sell its clean cement to local buyers at a competitive price.
“It tremendously simplifies our logistics,” Leah Ellis, the CEO and founder of Sublime Systems told me, by solving the unavoidable problem that at this early point in the company’s development, it would be impossible to deliver its cement to all the early adopters willing to pay extra for it. “We end up doing death by 1,000 pilots if we have to pilot here, there, everywhere. Being able to use the cement locally and have the carbon attribute be counted against Microsoft's Scope 3 emissions is a really innovative way to unstick this whole problem.”
That’s key. Scope 3 is a category of emissions that encompasses all the carbon that is related to a business but not directly produced by it. When Microsoft builds a data center, it has no direct control over the process used to make the cement that goes into the building. In theory, it does have the ability to say, “We want to use clean stuff, not dirty stuff.” But in reality, companies are struggling to effect change within their supply chains.
“The thing to understand right out the gate is that basically no major consumer-facing company that uses things like steel or aluminum or cement knows where their stuff actually comes from,” Stephen Lezak, a researcher focused on carbon markets at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at Oxford University, told me. He thinks that’s going to change, and hopes that in 15 years we all look back on this fact in horror. But in the meantime, “the urgency of the climate crisis requires using high integrity tools that aren't ideal, but still preserve fundamental integrity from a carbon accounting perspective,” he said.
Microsoft, for its part, told me it sees this transaction as a near-term solution and “prioritizes buying and installing physical product first” i.e., before buying certificates, “where technical, geographical, and supply chain considerations align.”
Sublime is currently building its first commercial plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which will use its unique zero-emissions process to produce 30,000 tons of cement per year. The Department of Energy awarded the company an $87 million grant to fund the project earlier this year. Holcim and CRH, two of the largest building materials companies in the world, have also invested in Sublime and agreed to purchase most of the volume produced by the first plant.
Ellis hopes the deal with Microsoft will help attract additional investment and get the company through its “awkward teenage years.” Sublime needs to show investors that “people want this material, people will pay that green premium so that we can drive up the volume so that that premium goes away,” she said.
As with carbon offsets, there are still ways to game the system. Microsoft recently co-authored a report with the clean energy think tank RMI describing what a larger book and claim market for clean cement might look like and what questions need to be answered to ensure the market is credible. Until clean cement is just as cheap or cheaper than conventional cement, it’s pretty clear this kind of market will help reduce emissions. But should the environmental attributes be tied to cement, or to concrete? How should the carbon intensity be calculated? How will emissions be tracked and traced from the producer to the contractor to the building itself?
Perhaps the most critical question is how to avoid double-counting. If Microsoft is buying the right to say it used clean cement, what can the company that bought the actual cement say? Will it be able to brag that its building is green?
When I posed this question to Ellis, and Ben Skinner, a manager at RMI and one of the authors of the report, each gave me a version of the same answer: Yes and no.
Ellis launched into a passionate monologue about the concrete companies and contractors and structural engineers who should be celebrated for taking the risk of using a new material. “This problem of cement emissions is so intractable,” she said. “We need to make cement more visible. We need to talk about this more. We need more people to care. And so that physical embodiment, having it stamped ‘Sublime cement,’ and having a plaque that shows the public, hey, these are the emissions reduced by this thing you see here, you want to celebrate that physical embodiment.” At the end of all this, she added, “And by no means am I saying that you should double count.”
The suggestion is that it should be possible to separate carbon accounting and green marketing. If Microsoft has booked the green attributes of a delivery of cement, the contractors or building owners who used the physical stuff should not be able to claim they used clean cement on their emissions balance sheets, Skinner said. (What number they should use is a tricky question that will have to be solved.) But perhaps they still deserve some kind of recognition.
What kind of recognition, Lezak told me, is a gray area. “There's a really difficult part of this whole conversation, where you start anchored in material science and climate science and everything is really rigorous,” he said. “And at some point, the train sort of moves on to the political economy track, and it's really tough because you look for the same sort of black and white answers to these questions and they just don't show up.”
The details of the Microsoft deal and who can claim what are still being negotiated. At the same time, RMI and a new nonprofit called the Center for Green Market Activation have started work to stand up a larger book and claim market for cement. Their goal is to develop standards for how these certificates should be created, traded, and used so that companies that do not have the expertise or budget or resources that Microsoft has can access them. “We do think that it's possible to create a really high integrity system,” Skinner, told me.
Whether you like this idea or hate it, get ready to hear a lot more about it. The Center for Green Market Activation, which launched in June, is working to develop book and claim markets across a range of carbon intensive industries, including aviation, trucking, maritime shipping, and chemicals. There is one clear alternative to these paper-trading schemes — regulations that require companies to use more green materials over time. But proponents don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Lezak, though initially skeptical of these markets, has grown to support the idea. “There are people out there arguing that if you want to claim the emissions reduction in green steel, you need to make sure that the green steel actually shows up on your factory floor,” he said. “That's a beautiful idea, but you're talking about potentially pulling out the rug from billions of dollars of high integrity carbon finance.”
On the World Bank’s bad record keeping, Trump’s town hall, and sustainable aviation fuel
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France are flooded after heavy rains • Sydney’s Bondi Beach is closed because lumps of toxic tar are washing ashore • A winter storm warning is in effect for parts of Montana.
Nearly 40% of the climate finance funds that have been distributed by the World Bank over the last seven years are unaccounted for due to poor record keeping, according to a new report from Oxfam International. That’s up to $41 billion that is untraceable. “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible,” the report said. “It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.”
The World Bank is the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, and has a goal of directing 45% of its total financing toward climate projects by 2025. The report noted that climate finance will be a key issue at the upcoming COP29, where countries will put forward a new global climate finance goal. “The lack of traceable spending could undermine trust in global climate finance efforts at this critical juncture,” Oxfam said.
During a town hall event hosted by Univision last night, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked by a veteran construction worker – who had seen first-hand “the devastating impacts of climate change” – if he still believed global warming was a “hoax.” In his response, Trump claimed to be an environmentalist, saying he’d won “many awards over the years” for the way he’d constructed his buildings, “the way I used the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand.” But, he said, “we can’t destroy our country” for the sake of saving the climate. He said the U.S. is competing against China, which “doesn’t spend anything on climate change.” According to the International Energy Agency, last year China alone accounted for one-third of the world’s clean energy investments.
Needless to say, Trump didn’t really answer the question about whether he thought climate change was real, but he did cast doubt on sea level rise and claimed “the real global warming we have to worry about is nuclear.”
I’ll just take this opportunity to remind you that Heatmap’s Jeva Lange put together an exhaustive fact-check on Trump’s climate and weather claims going back to 2001.
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now. The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. Whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
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The Department of Energy yesterday announced its first two loans for sustainable aviation fuel. The roughly $3 billion in funding will go to two companies:
“As the aviation sector aims to meet its decarbonization goals, SAF will become increasingly vital,” the DOE said in a statement. “SAF is the only viable near-term option to decarbonize the airline industry.”
A Canadian court’s ruling on a climate lawsuit today could influence similar cases in Canada and other countries. Seven young people are suing the Ontario government over its emissions targets, which they say are inadequate and violate their human rights. If the case heads to Canada’s Supreme Court, and the plaintiffs win, that would “dramatically open the door to new litigation,” constitutional law expert Emmett Macfarlane toldReuters. “That would be explosive. It would have immediate ramifications for all governments.”
The University of California, San Diego, is the first major public university to require all its undergraduate students to complete a climate change course.
They may not survive a full challenge, though.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.