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I thought the conference would be a pseudo-event. I didn’t think it would be like this.
The third day of events are ending here at COP28 in Dubai. If you read any international coverage of the conference, you probably saw that King Charles III of the United Kingdom and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil spoke at the main session today, along with many other world leaders. “The planet is tired of climate agreements and goals that were not fulfilled,” Lula said. “How many world leaders are, in fact, committed to save the planet?”
Vice President Kamala Harris is in town and expected to address the summit tomorrow.
I will be honest: I did not see the king or the president, and (Biden administration officials: stop reading now) I’m not sure whether I’ll see the VP tomorrow. I trusted that my colleagues in the media could ably cover their speeches, so instead I wandered the conference site and spoke to other attendees. Dubai is holding COP at what it calls the “Expo 2020” site, a massive campus that hosted a world’s fair-type event two years ago. At its center is the Al Wasl Plaza Dome, a 22-story hemisphere that acts as a surface for enormous, climate-themed projections. The scale of the grounds is huge, evoking Las Vegas or Disney World. Like a Disney park, the landscaping is immaculate and vaguely “global,” vaguely inspiring background music is piped into the environment at all times. It is easy to forget you are surrounded on all sides by parking lots.
I share this context not to extol the scale of Emirati infrastructure — they get enough of that already — but to give you a sense of the scale of COP. If you count delegates, staff, other attendees, and day visitors, more than 100,000 people will go to the climate conference this year, the UN climate director Simon Stiell announced yesterday. The campus absorbed many, perhaps most, of those people today. And most of them had absolutely nothing to do with whatever King Charles said at the plenary. Instead, they spent the day much as I did, attending other programming, meeting new people, catching up with old colleagues, and gawking.
Before I came to COP, I knew that it was — to borrow the late historian Daniel Boorstin’s phrase — a pseudo-event, a spectacle that exists partially to be covered in the press. The Paris Agreement’s central mechanism is the “naming and shaming” of climate underperformers, an idea that implies a press to name and a public sphere where the shaming can happen.
What I did not realize is that many of the main COP proceedings are a kind of pseudo-event within a pseudo-event — a media-driven story that acts as an organizing narrative for the larger conference. Yesterday, the big news out of COP was that countries launched the long-awaited loss and damage fund. But many people here had little to do with that accomplishment, and they learned the news of its adoption in more or less the same way that you did.
None of this is to disparage COP. Even though it might be a pseudo-event, it can still change the world — it has changed the world. I’ll write about how and why in the next few days.
This is Robinson Meyer’s third dispatch from Dubai, where he is attending COP28. Read the first here and second here, or sign up to receive the next one in your inbox with Heatmap Daily:
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A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.