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Current conditions: An atmospheric river brought life-threatening rain and flooding to Washington State • The U.S. Coast Guard is responding to another oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico • It is -52 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakutsk, Russia, one of the coldest cities in the world.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed this morning that 2023 will be the warmest year ever recorded on Earth. The news is not unexpected after back-to-back months of shattered heat records, but it puts added pressure on negotiators at the COP28 climate summit to set firm commitments to bring down planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Copernicus says the global average temperature from January through November has been 1.46 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average. That’s 2.63 degrees Fahrenheit. So far 2023 has seen six months that broke historical heat records, including last month, which was the hottest November ever recorded. “As long as greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising we can’t expect different outcomes from those seen this year,” says C3S director Carlo Buontempo.
Image: Copernicus Climate Change Service
Another headline-grabbing report out today warns Earth could trigger catastrophic climate-related tipping points within a decade. These include ice sheet collapse, thawing permafrost, coral reef die-out, and a breakdown of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic. The report, produced by an international group of more than 200 researchers, says these tipping points could result in “global-scale loss of capacity to grow major staple crops. Triggering one Earth system tipping point could trigger another, causing a domino effect of accelerating and unmanageable damage. Tipping points show that the overall threat posed by the climate and ecological crisis is far more severe than is commonly understood.”
At COP28, debates continued well into the night Tuesday over the language that will be used in the final draft of the all-important global stocktake (GST). The biggest point of contention comes down to the document’s 35th paragraph, which, among other things, will lay out the plans for fossil fuels. Will they be phased out? If so, how? According to climate policy advocate and lawyer Natalie Jones, China, India, and the Arab Coordination Group of countries have proposed deleting this paragraph entirely. Other countries, including Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, the EU and Norway are trying to keep the prospect of a fossil fuel phase out alive by tweaking the language in the paragraph to make it more palatable.
In other COP news, a group of countries including the U.S. and Canada have pledged to reduce their cooling-related emissions by at least 68% by 2050. So-called cooling emissions come from the technologies needed to keep things like medicine, food, and homes cold. They are expected to account for more than 10% of global emissions in 2050, especially as the world warms and things like air conditioning become important for human survival in many parts of the world. The “Global Cooling Pledge,” unveiled yesterday, is endorsed by 63 countries. India, which is expected to see the greatest growth in demand for air conditioning over the next three decades, is not expected to sign the pledge. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts India will have more than 1 billion AC units by 2050.
Year-to-date sales of electric vehicles in the U.S. surpassed 1 million for the first time, according to the National Automobile Dealer Association. There were 1,007,984 EVs sold from January through November 2023, which is a 50.7% increase compared to the same period a year ago. “This is by far the best year for EV sales in our nation’s history,” Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA), toldElectrek. Yesterday Bloombergconcluded, based on its own annual Zero-Emission Vehicle Factbook, that “reports of an electric vehicle slowdown have been greatly exaggerated.”
Climate change is making Christmas trees shed their needles, Modern Farmer reports. Cold temperatures in the fall tell conifer trees to start producing a resin that will protect them from frost over the winter. This resin has another purpose: keeping a tree’s needles intact. But as heat waves linger, this process isn’t being triggered before farmers have to harvest in time for the holiday season. The result? “That pile of shedding needles under the decorated tree,” Modern Farmer says. Researchers are working to identify trees that don’t rely on the cold to retain their needles.
“The aspiration of everyone as temperatures rise and incomes rise is that their wealth is measured by their cooling.” –Freetown mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Sierra Leone
Editor's note: A previous version of this article miscalculated a temperature in Fahrenheit from Celsius. It has been corrected. We regret the error.
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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.
Has Plug Power pulled the plug on its upstate New York facility?
In 2021, top elected officials in New York state promised that Plug Power, a nascent company in the growing hydrogen industry, would build a large hydrogen fuel production facility in the Buffalo-Rochester area. It was supposed to make the state an industry leader.
Today, the project is looking more like a warning sign about the perils of being a first-mover in the unproven hydrogen business.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Plug Power, an American hydrogen and fuel cell producer founded in 1997, believed it would capitalize on rising demand for the liquid fuel when it broke ground at its hydrogen production facility at Genesee County’s Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park in 2021, a project known colloquially as STAMP. Heavy polluting industries like steel and transportation were chomping at the bit to strike supply deals for hydrogen, a liquid fuel that produces no carbon when burned. And this New York plant would on paper be particularly attractive from a climate perspective: It would be powered by hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls, offering a potential carbon reduction of an estimated 14,000 tons of CO2 per year. It would also be the largest project of its kind in the Northeast.
Three years later and the project appears to be on ice, according to a phone call recording between New York county officials and a real estate developer that was obtained by Heatmap News.
Construction stopped in January, per the call, as did work Plug Power promised to do on an electrical substation that will also power a neighboring semiconductor manufacturing plant. Now energy-hungry data center developers are bidding to pick up the substation work instead in exchange for a spot at STAMP and access to some of the remaining hydroelectricity, and county officials are looking at buying Plug Power’s electrical equipment.
It is unclear whether the hydrogen production plant will ever be completed.
“They’ve put things on hold and now we’re coming to pick up the pieces,” Chris Suozzi, an executive vice president at the Genessee County Economic Development Authority, told one bidder – PRP Real Estate Management – on a call last month. PRP taped the call and shared it with us after it was first reported by local news nonprofit InvestigativePost. Suozzi also said on the call: “They’re not ready to go. They’re on pause. We don’t know what’s going to happen with them at this point.”
The New York Plug Power plant’s problems should be familiar to anyone in the climate tech startup space but for the unfamiliar, the company’s rapid growth seems to have run headlong into struggles with cash. A year ago Plug Power said in an investor filing there was a “substantial” concern the company may not have “sufficient funds to fund [its] operations through the next 12 months.” So problematic are Plug’s financial woes that they’ve become a political target; after the Energy Department offered a $1.6 billion conditional loan commitment to Plug for building hydrogen production plants, Republicans in Congress called for an inspector general investigation into the move.
But the New York production facility won’t benefit from the potential loan either. We’ve learned from two sources familiar with the matter that the project is not included in its potential loan application currently pending before DOE.
Then there has been the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act. Even though the project relies on carbon-free hydropower, it may not qualify for the IRA’s hydrogen production tax credit because of proposed requirements for fuel to rely on new renewable energy sources (known as “additionality”). This has been a major sticking point in implementation of the credit, and Plug Power is quoted in InvestigativePost last week linking the work stoppage at the production facility on waiting for the final regulation implementing the credit. This is even as the company uses the yet-to-be finalized credit in its financial analyses for other hydrogen facilities in operation today, like this one in Georgia.
Environmental justice issues have also been a drag on development. The native Tonawanda Seneca Nation is opposed to the entire industrial park because of the resulting impacts on wildlife, noise and the visual landscape. In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service revoked a necessary permit for a wastewater treatment pipeline that would be used by companies at the park.
Earthjustice attorney Alex Page – who is working with the Nation to fight the project – told me the tribe was told last year by the Energy Department that Plug Power had withdrawn the New York site from its loan application. The Nation will continue to fight the project and DOE’s loan financing to Plug Power on the chance that money could be reprogrammed to the industrial park. Page said: “The Nation remains very, very much opposed.”
We sent Plug Power multiple requests for comment as well as Suozzi. A representative for Plug Power declined to answer questions about the project. I got a text from a number listed for Suozzi asking to chat later, but I didn’t hear back before publication.
The week’s biggest fights around renewable energy
1. San Diego County, California – The battery backlash just got stronger after the city of Escondido, California, indefinitely banned permits to the entire sector in reaction to a battery fire last month.
2. Waldo County, Maine – The potential first floating offshore wind assembly site in America is now one step further in the permitting process, after Maine’s Department of Transportation released a pre-application alternatives analysis required for federal environmental reviews.
3. Dickinson County, Kansas – This one county may be a bellwether for future problems in Kansas, a state with many existing wind farms — and even more potential — but also a lot of opposition.
4. Washoe County, Nevada – The company behind the Burning Man festival will be acquiring nearby geothermal energy leases, in a settlement resolving litigation that had the high-profile naturalist escape challenging access to a renewable energy resource.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In North Carolina, the Kerr Lake Solar project proposed by Cypress Creek Renewables is facing its own apparent local onslaught at community meetings.
In California, Capstone and Eurowind Energy are seeking permission to build a long-duration battery storage facility in Alameda County.
In New Jersey, a coalition of shore towns and opposition groups fighting the EDF-Shell Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm have issued a new missive criticizing state financial benefits to the project.
In New York, the town of Oyster Bay looks like it’ll be extending its moratorium on BESS for at least another six months.
In Pennsylvania, a Pivot Energy solar farm also has some local organizing in the way.