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A zhuzhed-up explanation of the international plastics treaty negotiations you definitely didn't pay attention to this week.
Let’s just admit it: The INC-2 has a pizzazz problem. For one thing, if you’re not in the know, its name could easily be mistaken for the model number of
a large kitchen appliance. Even if you are in the know, it’s difficult to get excited about what is “the second of five U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Plastics meetings” — even if this one did take place in Paris.
But what the INC-2 lacks in, shall we say, broad public interest appeal, it makes up for in importance, compelling characters, and drama. Yes, I said it: drama!
Here’s everything you need to know about this week’s INC-2 negotiations, which concluded on Friday and have the ultimate aim of creating a first-of-its-kind legally binding global plastics treaty.
This week, over 2,000 participants from 175 countries flocked to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris to debate, lobby, demonstrate, observe, sing, make art, and generally get very little sleep. For many attendees, it was a reunion of sorts: The first Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC-1) was held six months ago in Uruguay; the next, INC-3, will take place in Kenya in November.
Why such a frenetic, globe-trotting schedule? Because the delegates only have until the end of 2024 — technically, just 15 more total negotiating days — to hammer out the specifics of the first international plastic pollution treaty, as directed by the U.N. Environment Assembly last year. If they’re successful, the treaty will be the most important international environmental agreement since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015.
It’s a complicated subject. Campaigns against things like plastic straws and takeout bags have come to be seen by some U.S. activists as distractions, while others have defended plastics’ enormous lifesaving upsides and the fact that a like-for-like replacement of everyday plastics with paper bags could, counterintuitively, skyrocket global emissions (fun fact: the single-use plastic bag was invented as an environmentally friendly alternative to cutting down trees).
But the INC delegates aren’t trying to get rid of plastics altogether, just reduce their use. The U.N. cites data that shows over a third of all plastics are used for “gratuitous” purposes like packaging, including food and beverage containers, which overwhelmingly end up in landfills. Cutting down on wasteful packaging while promoting recyclable and reusable goods could slash 80% of plastic pollution by 2040.
Unfortunately, the world’s plastic problem is only getting worse. Emissions from the making of plastics alone are expected to outpace coal emissions within the decade. By 2040, U.N. projections show conventional plastics, which are made using newly extracted fossil fuels and thus a major part of oil companies’ plans for surviving the energy transition, taking up a whopping 19% of the global carbon budget. And by 2060, the 139 million metric tons of plastic we produce every year could triple unless the world makes changes.
Anti-plastic activists, scientists, and a 55-country bloc of negotiators led by Rwanda and Norway that calls itself the “High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution” are pushing for caps on plastic production. Their argument is that cutting off plastics at the source is the only way to turn off the proverbial “tap” of pollution created during the “full lifecycle” of a plastic item, from the extraction of oil to make it, the energy required to shape it, and its eventual disposal in a landfill or recycling plant. Others are pushing to regulate what chemicals can be used to make plastics. And though it seems far less realistically achievable, a ban on single-use plastics has also been floated, including by the 14-nation Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) group.
\u201chttps://t.co/6SoYwpMWj7\u201d— Cate Bonacini (@Cate Bonacini) 1685601469
\u201chttps://t.co/a2NwIRMFpm\u201d— Cate Bonacini (@Cate Bonacini) 1685601469
The plastic treaty negotiations are breaking into three distinct camps, which I’ll call the “One Big Pledge” group, the “Bespoke Pledges” group, and “Saudi Arabia,” because it’s just Saudi Arabia.
The One Big Pledge group — primarily made up of the members of the 55-country High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution — wants an international, legally binding treaty that will “end plastic pollution by 2040” — however that target may be ultimately defined — by capping new plastic production at a “sustainable level,” likely by targeting single-use plastics; limiting the chemicals that can be used in the creation of plastics in order to reduce health hazards and encourage recyclability; and establish provisions for plastics at the end of their life to maximize reuse rather than leakage into the environment.
In a bit of pre-meeting drama, Japan ditched America to join the High Ambition Coalition, leaving the U.S. as “the only major developed country” that isn’t part of the group. High Ambition Coalition members also include Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Mexico.
The “Bespoke Pledges” group wants to take what The Washington Post calls a “less stringent” approach by letting countries “come up with their own pledges” — kind of like a children’s arts-and-craft project fair where everyone gets to make their own popsicle stick man, except instead of a popsicle stick man it’s a commitment to ending pollution and there are no penalties if yours sucks.
Some Democrats and assorted celebrities have protested that this approach is kind of lame, but the Biden administration is nevertheless pitching it as being more like the Paris Climate Agreement (which, of course, was notorious among activists for this very aspect of its structure). The U.S. is also insisting that it is being “just as ambitious” as the High Ambition Coalition even as others have deemed its position rather “underwhelming.” Hey, at least the American Chemistry Council likes it?
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia thinks the American plan of “come up with your own pledge and don’t worry about an enforcement mechanism” sounds basically great, but it could go for an even more hands-off treaty, too. Its proposal lists just two suggested “obligations” for signatories: “designing [plastics] for circularity” when possible and agreeing to share recycling tips with other countries.
For delegates, activists, and industry interests departing Paris this weekend, there was a distinct air of anxiety about how much work still lies ahead. Part of the issue was that negotiations in Paris got off to a slow — the rumor in the refillable water bottle fountain line is that it was an intentionally slow — start.
The biggest reason for the delay was an extended debate over the draft rules of procedure. First there was a kerfuffle about how voting blocs like the EU can cast votes on behalf of their member states. But that discussion gave some oil-producing countries like Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Iran an opening to try to revise the rules in a much bigger way: requiring decisions to ultimately have a consensus rather than be put to a vote.
\u201cNo multilateral environmental treaty has ever been negotiated without the option of voting. \n\nBrackets in #INC2 #PlasticsTreaty rule 38 would be a disaster for the planet and the future of environmental governance. \n\nhttps://t.co/HXOvgVjZWr\u201d— Magnus L\u00f8vold (@Magnus L\u00f8vold) 1685436365
The distinction between “voting” and “consensus,” while procedurally in the weeds, is actually a significant one. As the rule is written now, if consensus is not achieved, decisions then go to a vote, which must pass with two-thirds support. Countries that supported the change included Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela; countries that backed voting as a final option included the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, Norway, and Senegal, whose delegate explained the issue succinctly and to applause: “Consensus is what kills democracy,” he was reported as saying. “If one or two countries don’t agree, we’re stuck.” Without the option to vote, it’s likely any meaningful plastics treaty will be DOA.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s delegate, Camila Zepeda, was losing her patience at this point: “It’s a waste of time and energy ... We’ve heard arguments at length [that] don’t focus on the essential issue, plastic pollution,” she reportedly said. “Everyone, turn off your microphones, stop your speeches.”
\u201c#PlasticsTreaty: And just like that, another full day was spent disagreeing on rules of procedures in Paris. And still no discussion on plastics pollution \ud83e\udee0\u201d— Laura Mercier (@Laura Mercier) 1685466850
But if it was the intent of major oil-producing states to delay negotiations, it worked. After agreeing to disagree about the rule on Wednesday — essentially kicking the can down the road to INC-3 — states like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran continued to raise questions that seemed designed to run out the clock (the Iranian delegate’s concern about observing a reasonable bedtime, at least, was relatable). Mexico’s delegate finally snapped, waving her name placard above her head, scolding her colleagues that it was time to “roll up your sleeves and get to work,” and then grabbed her backpack and walked out of the room:
\u201cAs Saudi Arabia and Russia kept asking for the microphone, Mexico\u2019s delegate waved her name plate, said we have to go to these groups, put her rucksack on and walked out to applause and chants of \u201cMexico\u201d from some observers. Got her way. Session over. #INC2\u201d— Joe Lo (@Joe Lo) 1685479936
Attention then turned to what will likely be a crux of negotiations: the role of recycling and “circularity” in the eventual treaty. Anti-plastic activists are gunning hard for the first of the three classic R’s: to reduce the amount of plastic that gets made, period. Oil and chemical interests, though, wanted to focus on the third R: recycling.
There’s a reason even countries like Saudi Arabia (and the U.S.) are writing “circularity” into their obligations: proposals that push advanced plastic recycling, with the intent of extending the lifespan of plastics, will allow fossil fuel companies and states to keep extracting oil to make new plastics by taking the attention off the plastic caps being mulled by the High Ambition nations. There also isn’t an agreed-upon meaning of the term “circularity,” Inside Climate News points out, meaning countries and companies can use the eco-friendly buzzword without being nailed to a commitment they don’t intend to keep.
Additionally, there are lots of valid concerns about advanced recycling, from the heavy energy and emissions output required to extend the lifespan of plastics to the current technological inability to minimize the dangers of toxic chemicals produced in the process.
Some players have also have stressed that all the attention on recycling alone is too limited. “To focus on plastic waste in this treaty would be a failure because you have to look at plastic production to solve the crisis — including the extraction of fossil fuels and the toxic chemical additives,” Dr. Tadesse Amera, the co-chair of the International Pollutants Elimination Network, told Spain’s El País.
A global agreement on how to handle plastic pollution was still clearly a ways off on Friday as the conference wound down. But by the end of the week, the delegates could celebrate genuine progress toward formulating objectives, obligations, and implementation tactics, and had additionally mandated a zero draft text of the treaty be written by the chair, which will be considered at INC-3. Activists applauded the step, which due to the delays, had not been a given.
There remain major hurdles to clear, however. If there is a single major takeaway from INC-2, it’s that oil-producing countries are becoming worried enough about the treaty’s direction that they’re beginning to drop the cooperative veneer and drag their heels. Even a relatively “underwhelming” plan like United States’ voluntary pledge proposal could potentially be at risk of failing if the consensus group ultimately wins out. “We may have to conjure up some additional days to finalize these talks,” one participant told the Earth Negotiations Bulletin on Wednesday. A hypothetical “INC-6” entered the vocabulary.
In the meantime, the delegates, lobbyists, activists, and observers are on their way back to their respective countries to catch up on sleep, detox from all the chocolate that was consumed, and prepare for INC-3 in Nairobi in November. The clock is ticking but if there is a glimmer of hope for the anti-plastics team, it’s that the oil interests are outnumbered. As Yvette Arellano — the founder and executive director of the Houston-based environmental justice group Fenceline Watch — told me by email from the ground in Paris, “They know once this starts going, it’s only gonna catch more public interest and global momentum.”
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Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.