You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
An excerpt from David Lipsky’s The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial
Let’s say you’ve shipped out as a denier.
You’re in it for the action, the dollars, the travel, the fun. And you shade your eyes, glance up at a tall number: 97%, the percentage of active-duty climate researchers who accept man-made climate change.
This is what pollster Frank Luntz understood in 2002. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming,” Luntz wrote, in his famous battle memo. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”
And this is what was also understood by Dr. S Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, two of the graybeard prophets who launched the global-warming skepticism movement in the 1990s, that crucial tipping point in the battle between the warmers and the deniers. A word — a concept, a percentage — was your enemy. And every six years the IPCC, the international climate science body, would stamp along on its five thousand legs and drop down another big dose of consensus. Plant it in the headlines of every newspaper. Here was the spot on the tree to carve your “X.” As you spit in your palms and lifted the axe.
Dr. Singer, an atmospheric physicist who would become one of the world’s most prominent climate deniers, tried twice. The anti-consensus petitions have names: The Leipzig Declaration, the Heidelberg Appeal. They sound like spy movies: lovelorn and crestfallen thrillers starring a tongue-tied Jason Bourne, about the cities where he tried to make his feelings known.
The appeal came first, in 1992. Dr. Singer and an associate helped arrange a conference in Heidelberg, Germany. Scientists were invited to sign a petition.
At first, Dr. Singer called it a “statement.” Time passed, coasts cleared. And he was like a man alone at the breakfast bar, filling his plate. Dr. Singer called it “strongly worded.” Said the appeal “expressed skepticism on the urgency for global action to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions.” That it “urged statesmen to go slow on climate-change policies.”
As it happens, the Heidelberg Appeal never once mentions global warming. It’s very pro-science. It’s just not at all anti-climate science.
But it was a list of science names and got weaponized anyway. When denial Senator James Inhofe quoted the petition in Congress, this is how the message ran. “The Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. They agree it is a hoax.” Two possibilities: Either the senator had never read the appeal, or he hoped you hadn’t.
Dr. Singer took a firmer hand on the next go-round. New and improved — now with global warming.
This was 1995. Earlier that year, Dr. Singer had sent a fossil fuel company his prospectus. For a very reasonable $95,000, the scientist promised to help “stem the tide towards ever more onerous controls on energy use.”
His hook was ozone. The spray cans that had been phased out, Dr. Singer explained, “all on the basis of quite insubstantial science.”
So if funds were provided “without delay,” Dr. Singer could deliver: an event, a panel, and a round number — “a Statement of Support by a hundred or more climate scientists.” With the Singer specialty: “This Statement could then be quoted or reprinted in newspapers.”
I don’t know whether Dr. Singer ever secured his funding. But that November, a panel did convene: in Leipzig, Germany. And one year later, his Statement did appear: the Leipzig Declaration. With the promised one hundred signatures.
The names crinkled brows. (Harvard’s John Holdren, later science advisor to the Obama White House, wrote of them as a mirage or the dream you reconstruct over breakfast: the list “dissolves under scrutiny.”) Sleuths from Danish Broadcasting attempted to track down the 33 European signers. Four could not be located. Twelve denied signing or even knowing about any Leipzig Declaration. Three were offended to hear their names were associated with it. The Statement had also been signed by dentists, lab techs, engineers, and one off-course entomologist who landed briefly on the page.
But the Leipzig Declaration packed its bags and coast-to-coasted anyway — from the Wall Street Journal to the Orange County Register, migrating also to Canada, London, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand. “It is widely cited by conservative voices,” write journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “And is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue.”
Dr. Singer identifed a hardy, Band of Brothers spirit among his “one hundred climate scientists.” As he explained in the Wall Street Journal, “It takes a certain amount of courage to do this.”
What it didn’t necessarily take was a degree in science. Florida’s Saint Petersburg Times ran their Leipzig story on the front page. Because (a) Florida, sea level. And (b), one signer was a local, the weather guy over at Tampa Bay’s WTVT. Who lacked “a Ph.D. in any scientific field,” the paper noted. “Or, for that matter, a bachelor’s.”
Dr. Singer had met his quota by reaching out to these sportscasters of the air. Twenty-five weathermen signed in, a big klatch from the state of Ohio. This included Richard Groeber, owner and operator of Dick’s Weather Service: you dialed his phone number and he told you the weather.
The Petersburg newshound dialed. Was Dick Groeber, he asked, really a scientist?
“I sort of consider myself so,” Groeber replied. “I had two or three years of training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study.”
The reporter brought his concerns to the keeper of the signatures, Dr. Singer. The scientist’s answer is a testament to the virtue of persistence, of keeping an eye fixed always on the prize. What was truly important, Dr. Singer said, was “the fact that we can demonstrate that 100 or so scientists would put their names down.”
And I wonder if it bothered Dr. Singer. If it’s the story of his outranked life. That for the Oregon Petition — the signature list that did go over the top — the push came from the bigger, better honored, more consequential Fred.
This article was excerpted from David Lipsky’s new book "The Parrot and the Igloo."Courtesy W.W. Norton
I don’t know who took care of the introductions. I do know S. Fred Singer sent Arthur Robinson — a biochemist, five-time Republican nominee for Oregon’s 4th congressional district, and the founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a privately funded lab — material to beef up the research paper that accompanied the Oregon Petition. And I know that the Marshall Institute —— founded by the other Fred, Dr. Seitz, the physicist and tobacco industry consultant Business Week once called the “granddaddy of global-warming skeptics” — dispatched two specialists, climate Sherpas, to lug and guide Arthur along the trickier science crevasses.
One of them was later exposed on the front page of The New York Times. Dr. Willie Soon had been the beneficiary of $1.2 million in fossil fuel largesse. The last of his dinosaur generation to find their way into the tar pits.
“In correspondence with his corporate funders,” the Times reported in 2015, Dr. Soon “described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money.”
And then a beautiful single-sentence short story: capturing the whole project and spirit of denial. “Though often described on conservative news programs as a ‘Harvard astrophysicist,’ Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard.”
Arthur cowrote his paper with the two Dr. Seitz specialists, and a fellow member of the Oregon Institute faculty: his 21-year-old son, Zachary.
This father-son teamwork produced something strange. First, their paper said climate change would not occur. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, it reversed field and explained that the change was already in progress and accomplishing marvels.
Their concluding sentences drop the effort of science entirely. The language pans across streams and meadows — takes in a drowsy summer morning, with the sound of bees. “We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals,” the Robinsons write, a little dreamily, “as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift of the Industrial Revolution.”
Arthur’s paper had never been published or peer-reviewed. It was entirely homeschool.
And here’s where you can appreciate the great, freewheeling advantage of having fun. Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz collaborated on a tremendous prank.
Arthur had his report professionally printed. Now this home-cooked meal, this sloppy Joe, resembled an entrée at the end of a Food Network episode. The National Academy of Sciences produces one of the world’s most distinguished journals. Garnishing with font and layout, Robinson labored until his blessing looked, in the words of the journal Nature, “exactly like a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Everybody has the one résumé line they lean on. It’s whispered before you sweep over to shake hands; it will lead the obituaries when you step away forever. Frederick Seitz was the former National Academy president — publishers of the Proceedings journal whose format Arthur had copied.
Dr. Seitz wrote the letter that accompanied the Oregon Petition.
The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy. ... This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. ...We urge you to sign and return the petition card.
Dr. Seitz signed with his résumé line: Past President, The National Academy of Sciences.
A cover letter from an Academy president. A paper formatted to look exactly as if it had been published in the Academy magazine. (Plus the plural we urge, the institutional in our opinion — the speaking voice of an organization.) Arthur and Seitz had pulled off the greatest soundalike in denial history.
The package was then sent all across America — as one researcher wrote, to “virtually every scientist in every field.” And how could recipients fail to believe, tearing open their envelopes, that the Academy was reaching out to them, at an hour of scientific need?
In 1996, Nature had written about the “dwindling band of skeptics.” You picture palm fronds and breakers, the shoreline from Lord of the Flies: a rocky atoll among rising seas.
This line vexed deniers. It so bugged S. Fred Singer he ascribed it, for ease of attack, to Al Gore. (The scientist loved to attack the vice president.). So the other aim of the petition: to grow the movement, at least in the eyes of key readerships in the Washington metro area.
It really was their weakness: Demographics. Max Planck once made an ice-eyed observation about scientific change. It doesn’t result from fresh evidence, or the Kevlar argument. Positions get too dug in for that. It steals on gradually, in calendars and gravesides. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” the physicist wrote. “But rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The plain truth was the deniers weren’t getting any younger. Actual science was drawing the young PhDs. (When S. Fred Singer addressed a roomful of such climatologists in the spring of the Oregon Petition, the reception was not hostile. It was charity. His audience “politely pointed to datasets and to scientific research,” wrote science journalist Myanna Lahsen, “none of which Dr. Singer appeared to be familiar with.”) It’s why the great denial work was brought off by Frederick Seitz, 86, and S. Fred Singer, 78; and by Arthur Robinson, aged 56, whose footsteps two-time Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling had long ago banished from institutional hallways.
“What will happen is clear,” Arthur told supporters, in a sort of pre-invasion essay, as his envelopes mustered at the post office. “The warmers will be deprived of the central pillar that underlies their entire campaign.”
This was that tall, shade-throwing word: consensus. “Remove their facade of scientific consensus, and they will likely lose — if it is removed in time.”
And it worked. In the House and Senate, lawmakers said the petition proved climate change was “bogus” — a non-issue for “the vast majority” of scientists. (They needed something like it to be true. So they went ahead and believed it into truth.) It worked because it’s a big library, and we’re all busy people. And, as the bibliothecary Jorge Luis Borges once observed, “The person does not exist who, outside their own specialty, is not credulous.”
“Happy Earth Day, Al Gore!” Fred Singer wrote in his Washington Times column. “Your much-touted ‘scientific consensus’ on global warming has just been exposed as phony.” They’d finally found a way to bring down the tree.
In 2001, Scientific American went through Arthur Robinson’s signature books. Present on Arthur’s list were names submitted in a spirit of substitute-teacher abuse. (Arthur told the Associated Press that he had “no way of filtering out a fake.”) There was Shirl E. Cook and Richard Cool and Dr. House, and the presumably dependable Knight and the presumably less steady Dr. Red Wine, also the accommodating Betty Will, the in-terrible-distress W. C. Lust. Also someone who gave their name only as Looney. Plus a dash of celebrity like Michael J. Fox and John Grisham and the dramatis personae of the medical series M*A*S*H. Even some businesses, like R. C. Kannan & Associates, and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., had found a way to lift the pen and get involved. Dick Groeber — Dick’s Weather Service — had once again elected to lend the effort the weight of his endorsement. All these names appeared on Arthur’s petition as it was cited in Congress.
Arthur claimed only one false name was ever found to soil his list. (Some jokester had snuck on Dr. Geri Halliwell — Ginger Spice, of the empowerment band Spice Girls.) But post-media, all these names were quietly withdrawn. W. C. Lust and Betty Will and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., and Dick’s Weather Service, scrubbed from history.
The names Scientific American examined were real. Barrier to entry was not high. If you claimed a bachelor’s in math, science, or engineering, to Arthur’s way of thinking you were a climate scientist. (Even so, Dick Groeber had no real business being on this list.) Your kid’s math teacher could sign. So could her shop teacher, and the veterinarian.
These names were Styrofoam peanuts, packaging, and brushed aside. Scientific American took “a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science.”
Of the 26 names they could identify through the databases, “11 said they still agreed with the petition.” The magazine went on, “One was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.” The magazine estimated that Arthur had managed about 200 climate researchers — “a small fraction of the climatological community.” Remove number from box, shake off the packaging: What Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz had delivered was a sweaty means of confirming the consensus.
And still there were international headlines (“NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL WARMING”). And still Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer could make their use of the data.
Dr. Seitz told reporters the petition represented “the silent majority of the scientific community.” (Which meant at least 51 laconic percent.) And Dr. Singer called it “the largest group of scientists ever,” as if the petition combined a Caltech homecoming weekend with an especially congested Burning Man.
Arthur kept up the petition drive. Yet among supporters, he couldn’t quite bring himself to call the signers colleagues. The tongue values what it values.
“We’ve got now about 17,000 scien—” Arthur caught himself. “People with degrees in science.” As of 2008, he’d nearly doubled his figure.
S. Fred Singer experienced the same performance trouble. In 2012 he was still quoting it. Because it was the only thing — Arthur had given the movement the strongest evidence it ever had. But even the famously reliable Singer tongue went rogue. “There’s hundreds of us — thousands,” he said on PBS. “Look, 31,000 scientists and engineers signed a statement.” Then the scientist went a bit green. “Look, they’re not specialists in climate.”
But in 1998, when the ground was fresh, Dr. Singer told Congress that signers were “specialists in fields related to global warming.” He told readers, while the issue was being contested, they were “experts in the pertinent scientific fields.”
Arthur’s website gives his patriotic side of the figure. “31,487 American scientists,” he writes. “Including 9,029 Ph.D.s.” You needed a data point, a comparison.
So, for the doctoral number: America is home to half a million science and engineering PhDs. Arthur netted 1.8%. His yield was small. And for the bachelor’s number: We’ve awarded 10 million first degrees in science and engineering. Here Arthur’s petition was an absolute crash: 0.3%.
Arthur again sounded the Academy horn in a press release. “More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.” But Arthur had withheld the comparison. The Academy’s got 2,200 members. His yield was eerily consistent: 1.8%. The generally accepted number for climate scientists and warming is 97% to 3%. Arthur’s fate was to spend 25 years as superintendent of a consensus he loathed.
This article was excerpted and condensed from David Lipsky’s book The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, available now from W. W. Norton & Company ©2023.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Voters in the crucial swing state will also decide key questions on their — and our — climate future.
In four days, Pennsylvania will become just about the most important place on Earth.
It is unlikely that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump can reach the White House without carrying the Keystone State; winning Pennsylvania bumps either’s odds of prevailing in the whole election to over 90%, according to polling analyst Nate Silver’s models. The state will also play a deciding role in control of the U.S. House and Senate, which in turn will help or hamper the next president’s agenda. America’s domestic trajectory, its foreign policy decisions, and even its allies and enemies could all come down to the whims of the state’s 8.9 million registered voters.
But Pennsylvanians have other important choices to make on their ballots, too. “Pennsylvania is a major energy state, and its decisions — regardless of what type of energy it is — have a huge impact on America’s energy portfolio,” John Qua, the campaign manager of Lead Locally, which is supporting 17 down-ballot candidates in the state, told me.
As the nation’s second-biggest gas producer after Texas and third-biggest coal producer after Wyoming and West Virginia, Pennsylvania also holds the distinction of being the fifth-largest greenhouse gas-emitting state in the nation. Its state legislature hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 2008, in large part because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry over local politics. The American Petroleum Institute donates more to Pennsylvania lawmakers than those in any other state, and while fracking isn’t the decisive local issue it’s made out to be in the popular consciousness, it still employs around 100,000 people — more than made the difference in deciding the 2020 election in the state. (Harris notably reneged on her 2019 pledge to ban fracking if elected in an apparent overture to Pennsylvanians, although the state’s imperiled Democratic senator, Bob Casey, has been hammered by his Republican challenger over her prior position.)
Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, until at least 2026, and Democrats hold slim control over the state House of Representatives by a margin of 102 to 101. The ambition this cycle is to keep the state House and flip the Republican-held state Senate. Picking up three seats there would earn Democrats a governing trifecta, with a tie-breaking vote going to Democratic Lt. Gov Austin Davis. Flip four seats, and they’d have the majority.
But “if you asked me to bet you $10 that the Democrats would win, I wouldn’t take the bet,” David Masur, the executive director of PennEnvironment, a green research and advocacy group that works in the state, told me. “I think it’s just a long shot.”
The path to winning the state Senate and achieving a governing trifecta clearly runs through three districts. The first and easiest pickup is in SD-15, around the state capital in Harrisburg, where the “map is much friendlier to Democrats,” according to Masur. The party would then need to win a competitive seat in SD-37, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, which has tilted blue recently and also seems theoretically within reach. But things get trickier in SD-49, Democrats’ “white whale” district in Erie County, which President Biden won by 2 points but where Republican senator Dan Laughlin remains well-liked. To wrest back the chamber, in other words, the Democrats would “have to run the table,” Masur said. “I don’t even think there’s another race where you could go, ‘Oh, they could get the majority by winning this other seat.’ There’s nowhere else to go. They have to win those three.”
Because of recent redistricting, the climate groups working in the state are cautious about getting their hopes up too high. “Flipping the [state] Senate, which is currently held by Republicans, might be a two-cycle endeavor with these new maps,” Lead Locally’s Qua said. This doesn’t necessarily mean all is lost: Even maintaining control of two of the three levers of government in Pennsylvania would be a victory, and Democrats this summer managed to garner enough bipartisan support to pass legislation to bring solar panels to state schools.
But the stakes — and promises — of a trifecta feel crucial and tantalizingly close. According to a recent analysis by PennEnvironment, Pennsylvania is 48th in the nation for the percentage growth of total solar, wind, and geothermal in the past decade, and 46th in the nation for the percentage of growth in total solar over the past five years, generating less than its neighbors New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. “The fossil fuel industry is extremely moneyed and extremely influential, and it’s created a political reality where it’s very difficult to move good climate and clean energy policy forward in Harrisburg,” Flora Cardoni, PennEnvironment’s deputy director, told me. Climate obstructionists in the state Senate often refuse to call up good environmental policies for votes, leaving the state with “no laws on the books that require utility companies in Pennsylvania to increase the amount of clean renewable energy that they provide to their customers” which is “a huge impediment to progress.”
It’s not as if Democrats aren’t ready to go — they are. Shapiro is sitting on a two-bill plan for tackling climate change in the state. One would boost renewable energy to 35% of Pennsylvania’s total generation by 2035, which Cardoni described as “a huge step in the right direction, although we need to do much more.” The second bill would make polluters pay for their carbon emissions and spend the resulting money on clean air, water, and energy efficiency projects — essentially, a backup plan for if the state’s attempt to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative fails. (Owing to a question of constitutionality, RGGI is in limbo with the state’s Supreme Court.)
So, in a sense, you have to go for it. “Yeah, they’re really hard races,” admitted Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, which is supporting 26 candidates in the state. “But if you win,” she added, “you win the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country.” While she was loath to “compare our states against each other,” Spears pointed out that Pennsylvania’s emissions are about two and a half times those of Arizona, which makes it a much bigger opportunity for reductions.
Perhaps the most important point: No one really knows what’s going to happen. Not only are organizers working with new maps in the state due to 2022 redistricting, but state-level races also rarely attract substantial enough polling to make reliably predictive guesses, especially when there are so many toss-ups and razor-thin margins. Adding to the trickiness, Pennsylvania is one of the few states where residents still appear willing to split their tickets; in 2020, ticket-splitting between the president and the state Legislature was up to 15 points in places, which is part of why Climate Cabinet has targeted races in the state with margins of up to 10 points that other groups wouldn’t touch. “Folks have been like, ‘the Pennsylvania Senate’s not doable.’ That’s the word on the street,” Spears told me. “But I think people are forgetting a little bit that that was also the word on the street about the Minnesota Senate and the Michigan legislature,” which flipped during the 2022 midterms.
What’s encouraging is that Pennsylvania voters — contrary to their image of being fracking obsessives — have been curious or even enthusiastic about pivoting to clean energy when organizers have spoken with them. Following Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused outages across the state, many residents now “recognize that the grid is outdated,” Julia Kortrey, the deputy state policy director at Evergreen Action, a national climate advocacy group, told me. There’s an acknowledgment among many that “the status quo is not working.”
As in many parts of the country this year, local races in Pennsylvania are mainly focused on battles over education, abortion access, immigration, and crime, not necessarily clean energy. But often, climate-related issues are bubbling just under the surface. “I’m not going to go up to someone’s door and ask ‘What issue is on your mind today?’ and have them say, ‘I’m really worried about the PM2.5 concentration or the Mauna Loa CO2 readings,’” Spears told me. “But if they’re like, ‘The cost of living is too high,’ I’m going to have a conversation about home insurance.”
A particularly good example of this is playing out in one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House races, which will help determine the ultimate makeup of Congress. In the Lehigh Valley, Democratic Representative Susan Wild is attempting to hold off her Republican challenger, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie, who voted against the school solar bill and the state’s clean water act. Wild had been particularly instrumental in helping to replace lead pipes in the area, and she’s made her leadership on the issue prominent in her campaigning. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and lead pipe removal can seem very — I don’t want to say national, but it can be hard to visualize,” Nate Fowler, the regional campaigns director of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “But for voters in this part of the Commonwealth, it’s easy for them to understand why this is so important.”
It won’t be until after the dust from Tuesday settles — when Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes have been allocated, and its U.S. House and Senate races decided — that national attention will turn to the consequences of the state’s down-ballot races, if it ever does. But whether Democrats run the table or Republicans eat into their opponents’ grip on the legislature, Pennsylvania’s elections will be pivotal to the nation’s greater evolving energy story.
“So much of what we can accomplish in Pennsylvania will lay the groundwork for what is accomplished across the country,” Kortrey, of Evergreen Action, said. “I tell folks, ‘If we can do it in Pennsylvania, we can do it anywhere.’”
On an EV production pause, a fancy new chart, and positive emissions news from the EU.
Current conditions:New York City, Long Island, and the Lower Hudson Valley, along with much of the Northeast Corridor, are under red flag warnings for fire after a month of dry weather • Typhoon Kong-rey made landfill in Taiwan with winds over 125 miles per hour, injuring more than 500 and killing two • The first snow of the year showed up in Iowa and, yes, Hawaii.
Ford is planning a temporary shutdown of the plant that produces its fully electric truck, the F-150 Lightning. The shutdown will last seven weeks, Bloomberg reported. Earlier this week, Ford told investors that its profits had fallen in part due to a $1 billion charge it had taken after overhauling its electric vehicle strategy earlier this year. Ford sold just over 7,000 Lightnings in the third quarter of this year, more than double its sales in the third quarter of last year, but just about 3.5% of its total F-150 sales. Overall, electric vehicle sales rose in the third quarter, but when it came to trucks, consumers preferred the Tesla Cybertruck to the Lightning.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Department of Energy announced Thursday that it would award $45 million in funding for eight electric vehicle battery recycling programs. The projects “will advance research, development, and demonstration of recycling and second-life applications for batteries once used to power EVs,” the DOE said. The programs include money for diagnostics, automatic sorting for used batteries, and automated battery dissembling. The projects being funded are in Southern California, Michigan, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Tennessee.
Microsoft will use wood to build two data centers in Northern Virginia, the company announced Tuesday. Use of “cross-laminated timber” will reduce the carbon footprint of the data centers’ construction by about a third compared to steel and almost two-thirds compared to concert, the company said. This is just the latest move by Microsoft to try to reduce emissions associated with construction — the company is also working on developing a market for buying environmental attributes of low-carbon cement, Heatmap reported earlier this month. Microsoft’s “indirect” emissions of greenhouse gases rose by over 30% last year, largely thanks to the massive data center building binge it’s been on, along with the rest of Big Tech.
While plans to build data centers are creating electricity demand anxiety all over the country, the boom may not disrupt or strain New York’s grid, at least for a while, New York Focus reports. “Despite mounting pressures due to the state’s climate law and a burst in new manufacturing and tech facilities, New York has enough power plants operating or planned to meet statewide demand over the next decade,” the news nonprofit reported, citing an analysis by NYISO, which operates New York’s electricity market.
This finding is important because it means that not every carbon-emitting power plant has to stay open to meet new demand, which may let New York get closer to achieving its emissions targets. The reason for the more optimistic forecast is that some of the largest loads in the state like crypto mining or hydrogen told NYISO they can shut down during times of high demand on the grid.
European Union greenhouse gas emissions fell 8.3% in 2023, according to the European Commission’s annual climate report. It was the largest fall in emissions “in several decades,” not counting 2020, when economic activity plummeted due to Covid-19. Annual emissions have fallen by more than a third since 1990, while economic activity has increased by two-thirds since then. The report attributed much of the drop to the continent’s energy sector, whose emissions dropped 18%.
“This drop was due to a substantial increase in renewable electricity production (primarily wind and solar), at the expense of both coal and gas and, to a lesser extent, a decrease in both electricity and heat supply compared with 2022, and to the recovery of hydro and nuclear power.” The drop in EU emissions stands in contrast to rising emissions globally in 2023, according to the United Nations.
To the delight of energy nerds, the Energy Information Administration has published a new Sankey diagram showing how energy gets used in the U.S. economy.
While a Harris victory would no doubt ensure smoother negotiations, there’s still Congress to deal with.
Less than a week after election night in the U.S., the United Nations’ annual climate conference begins in Azerbaijan. COP29, as this year’s conference is called, has climate finance and carbon markets on the agenda. It’s no secret that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election could shift the tenor of negotiations significantly on both topics. Everyone knows there’s one candidate who’s better for the climate and one who will be much, much worse.
Even if Harris wins, however, the United States may well continue to shirk its global climate finance obligations. If the U.S. can’t deliver on what it promises at COP29, it may not matter what actually happens there.
Negotiators at COP29 are tasked with setting what’s called the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance, a goalpost for the amount of cash governments must put up to meet global climate investment needs. Global South countries excluding China have suggested that they require more than $1 trillion per year in external finance to meet their climate targets. An agreed-upon NCQG will also help all countries flesh out the latest iteration of their national climate plans, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions, as required by the Paris climate agreement.
And yet preliminary discussions over the summer were inconclusive, not just on the NCQG target itself but also on which countries are expected to contribute and what kinds of financing (e.g. public, private, loans, grants) will count toward it. More controversially to some climate activists and civil society groups, negotiators are also using COP29 to finalize a framework for the implementation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which calls for the creation of a global carbon credit market, which countries could use to trade emissions reductions and contribute to each others’ NDCs.
To put it simply: If Donald Trump wins, not much of this will matter. President Biden’s negotiators can still endorse ambitious NCQG and Article 6 targets, but there’s no evidence a second Trump administration will commit to delivering on them. Should Trump win, the U.S. will almost certainly cut itself out of the global climate finance architecture a second time. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, authored largely by Trump associates, not only calls for the U.S. to slash global climate and development funding (as Trump already called for in his first term) but also to withdraw from global negotiating fora entirely. In the breach, Trump administration diplomats will likely stress the importance of gas and non-renewable energy technologies (such as carbon capture) with an emphasis on ensuring domestic energy security and affordability, even as they prepare to gut most if not all of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
A Kamala Harris victory next week will assuredly be much better for both global emissions reductions and the climate diplomacy landscape. While she has outlined no specific proposals for global climate policy in particular, there is also no evidence that she will renege on any U.S. global commitments made in the past four years or attempt to repeal any climate laws.
As president, she will likely preserve President Biden’s key global climate and development policy initiatives, including the Just Energy Transition Partnerships and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. She will also likely support the Biden administration’s push to see the multilateral development banks support more investments in climate and development, particularly through mobilizing the private sector. The current World Bank President, Ajay Banga, was nominated by the United States in early 2023 after serving as co-chair of the Partnership for Central America, a private sector-backed economic development initiative launched by Vice President Harris herself as part of her broader engagement with the region. Their shared history suggests that they will continue collaborating on good terms if Harris is elected.
While none of this is directly connected to COP29 (and putting doubts about the efficacy of these programs aside), it speaks to the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to, at the very least, platforming global climate and development issues. But will Harris actually deliver on the U.S.’s commitments to the NCQG or otherwise meaningfully increase the amount of public spending devoted to global climate and development goals? Probably not ― although in that case, Congress will be the more likely culprit, not her.
Attempts to appropriate additional funds for global climate programs are cursed with a severe case of legislative inertia. Congress did not significantly slash funding for global climate priorities during the first Trump presidency, but it also did not raise it much during the Biden presidency. Last year’s bipartisan debt limit negotiations didn’t help, of course. But even in the early Biden presidency, when Democrats had their narrow trifecta, Congress massively undershot Biden’s budget requests for global climate-related priorities. In fiscal year 2022, Congress passed less than half of what Biden requested; since then, presidential requests for global climate spending have ballooned in size, while appropriations have stayed flat.
This divergence reflects a stable short-term equilibrium: The Biden administration can showcase the full range of its commitments and bona fides and blame Congress for its failure to deliver on any of them, while Congress can coast on the spending cap deals it made to avoid government shutdowns. But it also ignores the planet-sized elephant in the room — that there’s been no new spending on mitigating climate change. Regardless of who is president, there’s only so much discretionary funding they can ever reallocate toward priority programs absent additional appropriations.
(Here it seems pertinent to remind everyone that the U.S. has never endorsed the global consensus framework of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which would mean acknowledging a quasi-legal obligation to provide climate finance to Global South countries, on account of the fact that Congress has never been enthusiastic about this. The chances that anyone changes their tone are slim.)
In summary, even if Harris comes out on top on Tuesday, the U.S. will still be stuck in a holding pattern with respect to its global climate priorities. This puts the Biden administration’s COP29 negotiators in a vise: Pushing for a low NCQG gives other countries ground to criticize the U.S.’s inadequate ambition and care for the Global South relative to its ability to contribute, but pushing for an ambitious NCQG also gives other countries greater reason to criticize the U.S. if it fails to deliver. Ambition was never the problem; it has always been the delivery.
Optimistically, a Harris victory at least prevents the U.S. from being a roadblock to other countries’ climate action. But at a time when major Global North donor countries are cutting their aid budgets, American unwillingness to finance solutions to global climate and development challenges makes the rest of the world more dependent on private capital and, in turn, more vulnerable to market downturns, interest rate hikes, and capital outflows. (Alternatively, it makes Global South countries more dependent on petrostate wealth and Chinese imports for macroeconomic stability, although they may be less able to count on large Chinese capital inflows from here on out.) As expert report after expert report has detailed, climate change mitigation or adaptation simply will not happen at scale across the Global South without substantial new external financing.
Still, in lieu of new financing, a Harris administration could stress that efforts to catalyze private investment in the Global South (including through voluntary carbon markets) and reform global taxation also contribute to global decarbonization. And it could continue to argue that the U.S. is doing its part to decarbonize if it manages to pass more landmark climate and green industrialization laws like the Inflation Reduction Act. But it would be false to argue ― as President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have done at times, particularly in 2022 ― that the Inflation Reduction Act helps lower the cost of clean tech uptake across the Global South. This is not true — the credit for making clean technology, particularly solar energy, cheaper and more accessible for the Global South goes decisively to China. The U.S. is nowhere close to becoming a major clean technology exporter or a bona fide partner in green industrial transformation for any Global South country, policymakers’ pretensions to the contrary.
One prominent member of Harris’s advisory team, President Biden’s former National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, is trying to change that, advancing ideas like a “Clean Energy Marshall Plan” as an opportunity to deliver on both domestic industrial policy priorities and demands for global leadership vis-a-vis China; his writing exemplifies how American climate diplomacy is being subsumed into national security planning. (Deese is also a Heatmap contributor.) Tactically, this might work in the near-term: The bill to reauthorize the Development Finance Corporation, which would boost the U.S.’s ability to invest in decarbonization-related priorities across the Global South and particularly critical minerals supply chains, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee with bipartisan support over the summer. But this is not a strategy that on its own centers the climate and development needs of Global South countries.
So while a Democratic victory next week would certainly be a step toward continued climate action, and while what the Biden administration negotiates at COP29 will at least set a floor for future U.S. commitments (even if that floor is performative), we won’t see a major departure from the status quo unless a Harris administration can convince legislators that American leadership requires a lot more American money.
“We are not going back” ― this much is true. But it would be nice to go forward, too.