(The reason I wrote this piece about activism and despair last week was manifest by Delger Erdenesanaa at Inside Climate News in his piece, At COP26, Youth Activists From Around the World Call Out Decades of Delay.)
The final declaration of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow has yet to be approved. But unless a big surprise happens in the next few days, that document will move the world inches forward in combatting the climate crisis when we need to move miles.
Not that the summit has been without strong warnings about the impacts of inadequate action. Those have come from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, from leaders ranging from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and former President Barack Obama to European Commission President Ursula von de Leyen, and from Indigenous protesters like Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek and climate activists like Kenyan Green Generation Initiative founder Elizabeth Wathuti.
Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti
And there have been a few moments of promise—more than 40 nations calling for a phase-out of coal, a 130-nation vow to cut back on methane production, the agreement of fierce rivals China and the United States to work together to reduce their prodigious methane emissions, two dozen nations announcing they will stop funding fossil fuel projects in other countries in 2022, and seven nations and a Canadian province signing onto Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance’s moves to end oil and gas exploration and production. But encouraging as these developments are, their goals are non-binding, and no deadlines are set.
It was certainly satisfying for Americans who accept the science behind the warnings to see the U.S. rejoining the Paris agreement. President Joe Biden’s speech at the summit was heartening after four years of grotesque climate lies, and the destruction or undermining of many of the modest climate-related policies in place before Biden’s predecessor in the White House got his hands on them. Biden said:
Exactly so.
But there is a significant disconnect between his words and the action Biden took just days before he left for Glasgow—plans to lease hundreds of millions of new oil and gas operations in seven states in February. Next week, as announced in August, the Interior Department will also put 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico on the auction block for new drilling. Emily Portecorvo reports:
To be fair, stopping leasing would require some innovative maneuvering. After Biden paused leasing for a review during his first weeks in office, a district court in June ruled in a case brought by Louisiana and 12 other states that the Department of the Interior was legally mandated to offer leases. Interior is appealing the ruling but in August announced the decision to resume leasing.
Expressing his disappointment with the decision, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement Aug. 16 that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland “has the authority to pause leasing. [...] Holding more lease sales under today’s outdated standards is economically wasteful and environmentally destructive, and everyone not sitting in a fossil fuel boardroom knows it.”
Nicole Ghio, Friends of the Earth senior fossil fuels program manager said, “It’s encouraging that the Biden Administration is appealing this wrongful decision. However, the president made a promise to ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, and the American people expect him to keep it. The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.”
Last month, a U.N. report found that fossil fuel production plans of the world’s major nations will be producing 110% more coal, oil, and gas in 2030 than would align with keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. Another study published in September found that holding the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees requires 60% of oil and gas reserves to stay in the ground. Opening up millions of acres for continued exploration and production is contrary to every nation doing “its part with ambitious targets to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and specific plans of how to get there ...”
Right now, there is the additional problem with the pandemic inflation, which is reflected pretty much across the economy—and not just in the United States. Besides at the grocery store, this inflation has been particularly apparent at gasoline pumps because oil prices have soared. This has generated calls for Biden to do something to drive those prices down. In July, he asked the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates to increase their oil production. Fearful of the potential impacts of higher gasoline prices on the 2022 midterm elections, a number of Democrats have called for Biden to ban oil exports.
On Wednesday, Chris Cuomo, one of CNN’s news anchors, suggested that Biden immediately summon oil CEOs to the White House and get them on board to lower prices by cranking up supply. It’s hard to imagine a more cognitively dissonant way to send these executives away high-fiving each other and to flip the bird at our desperate need to get ourselves off the fossil fuel teat that is feeding global warming. We have a long way to go before words mesh with actions.
The names of coal miners whose lives were cut short by the mine are carved into a memorial on Aug. 25, 2019, in Cumberland, Kentucky. In Harlan County, the heart eastern Kentucky’s coal region, Cumberland has lost nearly half of its population since 1980 primarily due to disappearing coal jobs.
Last month, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and 11 Democratic co-sponsors introduced S.2966, the American Energy Worker Opportunity Act of 2021. Last week, Michigan Congressman Andy Levin introduced a companion bill in the House with 15 Democratic co-sponsors. The idea is to include this as part of the Build Back Better bill. As noted in a press release from Brown’s office:
An eligible worker under the bill is one whose job was terminated from a coal mine, coal-fired power plant, coal transport, or oil refinery, provided that the worker was employed continuously full time for at least 12 months before being laid off. Such workers would receive wage replacements or supplements in addition to assistance to maintain health benefits and contribute to retirement. Workers would also be eligible for grants for education and training up to and including a four-year degree. Children of dislocated workers would receive direct grants allowable education and training up to and including a four-year degree.
The bill is endorsed by: United Steelworkers (USW), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), AFL-CIO, BlueGreen Alliance, National Wildlife Federation, League of Conservation Voters (LCV), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority, writes of the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, “This is a big deal”:
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto—The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality writes says of the infrastructure bill:
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant
The announcement in 2016 that Diablo Canyon, the three-decade-old operation that is California’s last nuclear power plant, will be shuttered by 2025, brought cheers and objections. “This is an historic agreement,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, one of several groups who pushed for the shutdown, “It sets a date for the certain end of nuclear power in California and assures replacement with clean, safe, cost-competitive, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage.” But some critics decried the move, pointing out that the plant provides 1,500 jobs and $1 billion a year to the local economy. Other objections came from pro-nuclear environmental advocates who worry that the state cannot achieve a full transition to clean energy if the plant switches off its two 1.1-gigawatt reactors too soon. The shutdown process has nonetheless moved forward, not least because the plant is surrounded by geological fault lines.
Now, a new study—An Assessment of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for Zero-Carbon Electricity, Desalination, and Hydrogen Production—argues in favor of keeping the plant running until 2035 and “would reduce California power sector carbon emissions by more than 10% from 2017 levels and reduce reliance on gas, save $2.6 billion in power system costs, and bolster system reliability to mitigate brownouts.” Continuing operations to 2045 and beyond, the authors says, could save up to $21 billion in power system costs.
The plant, they assert, could add significantly to freshwater supplies through desalination and at much lower cost than that provided by the environmentally problematic Delta Conveyance Project. It could also produce clean hydrogen and do so more cheaply than solar or wind, the authors assert. It also could increase the reliability of the grid as wind and solar provide an increasing percentage of the state’s electricity.
Said former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has long cautioned against a “premature” shutdown of nuclear power plants, “We are not in a position in the near-term future to go to 100% renewable energy. We will need some power that we can turn on and dispatch at will, and that leaves two choices: fossil fuel or nuclear.”
Reversing direction on the shutdown would require undergoing the lengthy process of renewing Nuclear Regulatory Commission operating licenses for the reactors, which expire in 2024 and 2025. It would also require overcoming the political clout of the forces that spurred Pacific Gas & Electric to agree to the shutdown in the first place.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
YouTube Video
A HALF DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
• Nations, automakers pledge no new fossil fuel cars by 2040: “As representatives of governments, businesses, and other organizations with an influence over the future of the automotive industry and road transport, we commit to rapidly accelerating the transition to zero-emission vehicles to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” the declaration stated. Signed by 33 countries, six automakers, 40 cities, and a handful of financial institutions and investors, the pledge is non-binding. Among those not signing: the United States, China, and Japan, three of the world’s top four auto markets. The fourth, Europe, did sign on.
• Financial Markets May Kill Off Fossil Fuels Before Governments Do. As the cost of capital goes up, the prospects for fossil fuel projects go down, by Steve Hanley.
Crew of a whaling ship check a whaling gun or harpoon before departure at Ayukawa port in Ishinomaki City on April 26, 2014.
• The Enormous Hole That Whaling Left Behind. “The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves. In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.” By Ed Yong
Flames consume multiple homes as the Caldor fire pushes into the Echo Summit area,in California on Aug. 30, 2021.
• Why fire experts are hopeful. Wildfire scientists dispel common misconceptions about forest management, detailing what needs to change and why it’s urgent, by Kylie Mohr. “A team of more than three dozen people from universities, conservation groups, and government labs published an unusual trio of scientific papers in August in the journal Ecological Applications. Together, the studies are meant to provide a roadmap for how land managers and policymakers can move from passive to proactive wildfire and forest management.”
• Oklahoma Proposes Letting Gas Utility Charge a $1,400 ‘Exit Fee’ To Go Electric. The fee could give the fossil fuel industry a new tool to slow the energy transition, by Alexander C. Kaufman.
• A billion people will suffer extreme heat at just 2°C heating: A new study says the deadly combination of temperature and humidity could increase the number of Earthlings exposed to extreme heating by 15 times over what is today the case. The U.K. Met Office assessed wet-bulb temperature, which combines both heat and humidity. At 35°C, the human body can no longer cool itself by sweating. Even healthy people sitting in the shade will die within six hours. Damian Carrington reports, “The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation, according to 2018 research.”
The final declaration of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow has yet to be approved. But unless a big surprise happens in the next few days, that document will move the world inches forward in combatting the climate crisis when we need to move miles.
Not that the summit has been without strong warnings about the impacts of inadequate action. Those have come from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, from leaders ranging from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and former President Barack Obama to European Commission President Ursula von de Leyen, and from Indigenous protesters like Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek and climate activists like Kenyan Green Generation Initiative founder Elizabeth Wathuti.
Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti
And there have been a few moments of promise—more than 40 nations calling for a phase-out of coal, a 130-nation vow to cut back on methane production, the agreement of fierce rivals China and the United States to work together to reduce their prodigious methane emissions, two dozen nations announcing they will stop funding fossil fuel projects in other countries in 2022, and seven nations and a Canadian province signing onto Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance’s moves to end oil and gas exploration and production. But encouraging as these developments are, their goals are non-binding, and no deadlines are set.
It was certainly satisfying for Americans who accept the science behind the warnings to see the U.S. rejoining the Paris agreement. President Joe Biden’s speech at the summit was heartening after four years of grotesque climate lies, and the destruction or undermining of many of the modest climate-related policies in place before Biden’s predecessor in the White House got his hands on them. Biden said:
Exactly so.
But there is a significant disconnect between his words and the action Biden took just days before he left for Glasgow—plans to lease hundreds of millions of new oil and gas operations in seven states in February. Next week, as announced in August, the Interior Department will also put 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico on the auction block for new drilling. Emily Portecorvo reports:
To be fair, stopping leasing would require some innovative maneuvering. After Biden paused leasing for a review during his first weeks in office, a district court in June ruled in a case brought by Louisiana and 12 other states that the Department of the Interior was legally mandated to offer leases. Interior is appealing the ruling but in August announced the decision to resume leasing.
Expressing his disappointment with the decision, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement Aug. 16 that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland “has the authority to pause leasing. [...] Holding more lease sales under today’s outdated standards is economically wasteful and environmentally destructive, and everyone not sitting in a fossil fuel boardroom knows it.”
Nicole Ghio, Friends of the Earth senior fossil fuels program manager said, “It’s encouraging that the Biden Administration is appealing this wrongful decision. However, the president made a promise to ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, and the American people expect him to keep it. The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.”
Last month, a U.N. report found that fossil fuel production plans of the world’s major nations will be producing 110% more coal, oil, and gas in 2030 than would align with keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. Another study published in September found that holding the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees requires 60% of oil and gas reserves to stay in the ground. Opening up millions of acres for continued exploration and production is contrary to every nation doing “its part with ambitious targets to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and specific plans of how to get there ...”
Right now, there is the additional problem with the pandemic inflation, which is reflected pretty much across the economy—and not just in the United States. Besides at the grocery store, this inflation has been particularly apparent at gasoline pumps because oil prices have soared. This has generated calls for Biden to do something to drive those prices down. In July, he asked the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates to increase their oil production. Fearful of the potential impacts of higher gasoline prices on the 2022 midterm elections, a number of Democrats have called for Biden to ban oil exports.
On Wednesday, Chris Cuomo, one of CNN’s news anchors, suggested that Biden immediately summon oil CEOs to the White House and get them on board to lower prices by cranking up supply. It’s hard to imagine a more cognitively dissonant way to send these executives away high-fiving each other and to flip the bird at our desperate need to get ourselves off the fossil fuel teat that is feeding global warming. We have a long way to go before words mesh with actions.
ECO-TWEET
SHORT TAKES
The names of coal miners whose lives were cut short by the mine are carved into a memorial on Aug. 25, 2019, in Cumberland, Kentucky. In Harlan County, the heart eastern Kentucky’s coal region, Cumberland has lost nearly half of its population since 1980 primarily due to disappearing coal jobs.
SEnate BILL TO HELP DISPLACED FOSSIL FUEL WORKERS gets house support
Last month, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and 11 Democratic co-sponsors introduced S.2966, the American Energy Worker Opportunity Act of 2021. Last week, Michigan Congressman Andy Levin introduced a companion bill in the House with 15 Democratic co-sponsors. The idea is to include this as part of the Build Back Better bill. As noted in a press release from Brown’s office:
An eligible worker under the bill is one whose job was terminated from a coal mine, coal-fired power plant, coal transport, or oil refinery, provided that the worker was employed continuously full time for at least 12 months before being laid off. Such workers would receive wage replacements or supplements in addition to assistance to maintain health benefits and contribute to retirement. Workers would also be eligible for grants for education and training up to and including a four-year degree. Children of dislocated workers would receive direct grants allowable education and training up to and including a four-year degree.
The bill is endorsed by: United Steelworkers (USW), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), AFL-CIO, BlueGreen Alliance, National Wildlife Federation, League of Conservation Voters (LCV), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
TWO OPINIONS ON THE PASSAGE OF THE BIPARTISAN INFRASTRUCTURE BILL
Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority, writes of the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, “This is a big deal”:
When you examine the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) through a historical lens, it looks pretty damn good. Throughout US history there has actually been pretty strong support for robust government investment in people and infrastructure so long as the beneficiaries of said largesse were white. The New Deal and the GI Bill enjoyed broad support, but, as Ira Katznelson wrote in When Affirmative Action Was White, “the GI Bill did create a more middle-class society, but almost exclusively for whites.”
As people of color began to demand their fair share of the public pie (which they helped bake through back-breaking, wealth-creating work by, among other things, picking cotton and grapes and laying railroad tracks), the political will for public investments dropped dramatically.
From Prince Edward county, Virginia, shutting down its schools entirely rather than desegregate in 1959 to the fierce resistance to Obamacare, getting support for any public investments has been a Herculean task. As a result the infrastructure has atrophied in ways that endanger the public in general and poor people and people of color in particular.
The Flint, Michigan, water crisis showed how aging lead pipes can create a health crisis. Every lead pipe in the country will now be replaced. The pandemic laid bare the digital divide of who has access to high-speed internet and who doesn’t, and now rural areas can get broadband access.
Politically, you don’t have to look far back into history to understand the importance of the infrastructure bill. No legislation at all would be coming out of Congress had Stacey Abrams and the Georgia civic engagement groups not flipped the two Senate seats in the January runoff elections. Given where we were, I’m feeling that the BIF is a BFD.
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto—The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality writes says of the infrastructure bill:
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant
STUDY SAYS CALIFORNIA’S LAST NUCLEAR POWER PLANT NEEDS TO REMAIN OPEN
The announcement in 2016 that Diablo Canyon, the three-decade-old operation that is California’s last nuclear power plant, will be shuttered by 2025, brought cheers and objections. “This is an historic agreement,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, one of several groups who pushed for the shutdown, “It sets a date for the certain end of nuclear power in California and assures replacement with clean, safe, cost-competitive, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage.” But some critics decried the move, pointing out that the plant provides 1,500 jobs and $1 billion a year to the local economy. Other objections came from pro-nuclear environmental advocates who worry that the state cannot achieve a full transition to clean energy if the plant switches off its two 1.1-gigawatt reactors too soon. The shutdown process has nonetheless moved forward, not least because the plant is surrounded by geological fault lines.
Now, a new study—An Assessment of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for Zero-Carbon Electricity, Desalination, and Hydrogen Production—argues in favor of keeping the plant running until 2035 and “would reduce California power sector carbon emissions by more than 10% from 2017 levels and reduce reliance on gas, save $2.6 billion in power system costs, and bolster system reliability to mitigate brownouts.” Continuing operations to 2045 and beyond, the authors says, could save up to $21 billion in power system costs.
The plant, they assert, could add significantly to freshwater supplies through desalination and at much lower cost than that provided by the environmentally problematic Delta Conveyance Project. It could also produce clean hydrogen and do so more cheaply than solar or wind, the authors assert. It also could increase the reliability of the grid as wind and solar provide an increasing percentage of the state’s electricity.
Said former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has long cautioned against a “premature” shutdown of nuclear power plants, “We are not in a position in the near-term future to go to 100% renewable energy. We will need some power that we can turn on and dispatch at will, and that leaves two choices: fossil fuel or nuclear.”
Reversing direction on the shutdown would require undergoing the lengthy process of renewing Nuclear Regulatory Commission operating licenses for the reactors, which expire in 2024 and 2025. It would also require overcoming the political clout of the forces that spurred Pacific Gas & Electric to agree to the shutdown in the first place.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
YouTube Video
A HALF DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
• Nations, automakers pledge no new fossil fuel cars by 2040: “As representatives of governments, businesses, and other organizations with an influence over the future of the automotive industry and road transport, we commit to rapidly accelerating the transition to zero-emission vehicles to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” the declaration stated. Signed by 33 countries, six automakers, 40 cities, and a handful of financial institutions and investors, the pledge is non-binding. Among those not signing: the United States, China, and Japan, three of the world’s top four auto markets. The fourth, Europe, did sign on.
• Financial Markets May Kill Off Fossil Fuels Before Governments Do. As the cost of capital goes up, the prospects for fossil fuel projects go down, by Steve Hanley.
Crew of a whaling ship check a whaling gun or harpoon before departure at Ayukawa port in Ishinomaki City on April 26, 2014.
• The Enormous Hole That Whaling Left Behind. “The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves. In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.” By Ed Yong
Flames consume multiple homes as the Caldor fire pushes into the Echo Summit area,in California on Aug. 30, 2021.
• Why fire experts are hopeful. Wildfire scientists dispel common misconceptions about forest management, detailing what needs to change and why it’s urgent, by Kylie Mohr. “A team of more than three dozen people from universities, conservation groups, and government labs published an unusual trio of scientific papers in August in the journal Ecological Applications. Together, the studies are meant to provide a roadmap for how land managers and policymakers can move from passive to proactive wildfire and forest management.”
• Oklahoma Proposes Letting Gas Utility Charge a $1,400 ‘Exit Fee’ To Go Electric. The fee could give the fossil fuel industry a new tool to slow the energy transition, by Alexander C. Kaufman.
• A billion people will suffer extreme heat at just 2°C heating: A new study says the deadly combination of temperature and humidity could increase the number of Earthlings exposed to extreme heating by 15 times over what is today the case. The U.K. Met Office assessed wet-bulb temperature, which combines both heat and humidity. At 35°C, the human body can no longer cool itself by sweating. Even healthy people sitting in the shade will die within six hours. Damian Carrington reports, “The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation, according to 2018 research.”