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What parliamentary elections in France and the U.K. mean for everyone else.
While America has been distracted by its suddenly-very-real upcoming election, two other important political stories have been unfolding across the pond. The results of last week’s parliamentary votes in France and the United Kingdom have the power to sway global climate policy — and they might even contain lessons for the U.S. about the rise (or fall) of the far-right.
In June, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, and the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen was widely expected to achieve a majority in the country’s 577-seat National Assembly. Instead, the New Popular Front, a hastily-formed alliance between the hard left, Greens, and Socialists, came out on top in a runoff, followed by the centrist Ensemble (which includes Macron’s Renaissance party) and the National Rally in a distant third. Because no party won the 289 seats needed to gain control of the chamber, the left and center now have to form a coalition government, which means ideological compromise — something that’s distinctly un-French. “We're not the Germans, we're not the Spanish, we're not the Italians — we don't do coalitions,” one French political commentator toldSky News.
Climate change wasn’t a big theme, but the National Rally’s proposals certainly had experts nervous. The party tapped into simmering discontent among some demographics — farmers, in particular — who feel unfairly burdened by new regulations in service of the European Union’s ambitious agenda, known as the Green Deal, including a goal to cut the bloc’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. If it had won, the party planned to dismantle France’s energy efficiency rules, roll back a 2035 ban on new gas-powered cars, block new wind farms, do away with low-emission zones, and transform electricity trade. France is already the EU’s third biggest emitter, and the EU as a whole is responsible for about 9% of global CO2 emissions, although emissions have been falling, especially in the energy sector.
As the dust settles in France, the biggest danger to climate policy now is stalemate. The lackluster results for the far right are no doubt a relief to the climate conscious. “We have avoided a catastrophe,” Alain Fischer, president of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, toldNature. The winning NFP, for its part, backs the Green Deal’s emissions targets and wants France to become “the European leader in renewable energies” through offshore wind power and the development of hydroelectric power. It also calls for the “creation of an international court for climate and environmental justice.” But the next several months are likely to be chaotic as the parties tussle over what the government should look like, and there is no deadline for these decisions to be made. The leadership limbo could bring political paralysis at a time when the EU is just getting its bearings following bloc-wide parliamentary elections — which, by the way, saw the Greens lose seats in lots of places. In response, the non-profit Climate Group put out a statement calling for the French government to “commit to safeguarding the EU Green Deal and ensuring a sustainable future for the continent.” The good news is that a large majority of EU voters want to see more climate action.
The Labour Party won the general election in a landslide, bringing an end to 14 years of Conservative Party rule. During his tenure, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak watered down key net-zero strategies, delayed a ban on new combustion engine vehicles, scrapped energy efficiency standards, and approved a large new oil field in the North Sea. His party also pulled low-emission zones into the culture wars in a desperate attempt to win over voters. None of this played to his advantage. According to Desmog, two-thirds of the Conservative members of Parliament who were anti-net zero lost their seats, including the former energy secretary. “With a clear mandate for climate action,” wrote climate change think tank E3G, “all eyes are now on Labour to deliver.”
New Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to turn the U.K. into a “clean energy superpower” by doubling onshore wind, tripling solar power, and quadrupling offshore wind by 2030. He also plans to upgrade the grid to speed the rollout of clean energy projects, while at the same time denying new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. He wants to establish a publicly owned clean energy firm and decarbonize the power sector by 2030. And he plans to reinstate the 2030 ban on new gas cars. The goals are lofty, and meeting them will “extensive change across every sector of the economy,” wrote Carbon Brief. But Labour seems to be wasting little time. Days after taking power, the new government scrapped a ban on onshore wind farms that had been in place since 2015 and which the new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves called “absurd.”
The U.K. accounts for about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That might be paltry compared to, say, the U.S. (13.5%) or China (32%), but it has a chance now to use its global influence and proximity to Europe to keep the needle moving in the right direction. That goes especially if it is nudged by the Green party, which surprised everyone by quadrupling its number of seats in Parliament (albeit to just four). As The New York Timesnoted, Britain is where the industrial revolution began, so “the speed and scale of Britain’s energy transition is likely to be closely watched by other industrialized countries and emerging economies alike.”
What’s clear from both of these cases is that people really care about climate policy and are willing to vote with that in mind. That can swing either way, though, depending on the particular set of policies and how they affect the electorate. As extreme weather intensifies, however, it may become more difficult for far-right parties to minimize the significance of climate change. “We need to recognize that extreme weather is politicizing people against this climate denial,” said Paul Dickinson, founder of CDP, an emissions disclosure platform, and co-host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism. “It is the Achilles heel of the extreme right that they’re opposed to the realities of extreme weather. That’s how I think if we’re organized and disciplined, we will defeat them.”
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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.
The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.
And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.
Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.
A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.
“Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene — we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy,” Friederike Otto, the lead of WWA and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “But vitally, we need the political will.” Alarmingly, the attribution study found that storms could drop an additional 10% or more rain on average as soon as the 2050s if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius.
WWA’s study is not the first to be released on Hurricane Helene, but it was still produced incredibly quickly and has not been peer reviewed. Just a few weeks ago, the group issued a correction on a report estimating the contribution of climate change to recent flooding in Europe.
Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely. (WWA relied on Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index for oceans for its research, but found “climate change made the unusually hot sea surface temperature about 200-500 times more likely.”)
Attribution science is incredibly tricky, especially for a storm system like a hurricane that has variables ranging from wind shear to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation to ocean temperatures and jet stream variations. When I spoke to a member of the WWA team earlier this year, I was told the organization specifically avoids attributing the intensification of any individual hurricane — in theory, one of the more straightforward relationships — to climate change because of the relatively limited historical modeling available. Even something like rainfall “is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods that you see because there are other factors,” WWA’s Clair Barnes previously told me — for example, the steep-sided mountains and hollows of western North Carolina, which served as funnels for rainfall to an especially devastating effect.
But regarding the relationship between hurricanes and climate change more generally, “We’re relatively confident that storms will get more intense” in a warming world, Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton geoscientist, explained on a recent episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. “And we’re really confident that storms will get wetter.”
Helene and Milton hammer that point home: once-in-a-generation storms can now arrive on back-to-back weekends. You can almost understand the impulse to devise a zany explanation as to why. Only, the truth is far simpler than cloud seeding or space lasers: a warmer atmosphere makes for warmer oceans, which make for wetter, more intense storms. And while hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up. That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.