Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century

The system of ocean currents that regulates the climate for a swath of the planet could collapse sooner than expected, a new analysis found.

By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times, July 25, 2023

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

It was a surprise even to the researchers that their analysis showed a potential collapse coming so soon, one of them, Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen, said in an interview. Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

Which is why it was also a surprise, Dr. Ditlevsen said, that she and her co-author were able to pin down the timing of a collapse at all. Scientists are bound to continue studying and debating the issue, but Dr. Ditlevsen said the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

The new research, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude. Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Evidence from ice and sediment cores indicates that the Atlantic circulation underwent abrupt stops and starts in the deep past. But scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

In interviews, several researchers who study the overturning applauded the new analysis for using a novel approach to predict when we might cross a tipping point, particularly given how hard it has been to do so using computer models of the global climate. But they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

But the projects began collecting data in 2004 at the earliest, which isn’t enough time to draw firm long-term conclusions. “It is extremely difficult to look at a short record for the ocean overturning and say what it is going to do over 30, 40 or 50 years,” Dr. Lozier said.

Levke Caesar, a postdoctoral researcher studying the overturning at the University of Bremen in Germany, expressed concerns about the older temperature records that Dr. Ditlevsen and Dr. Ditlevsen used to compute their proxy. These records, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, might not be reliable enough to be used for fine-toothed statistical analysis without careful adjustments, she said.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents, Dr. Caesar said. “There is something happening, and it’s likely out of the ordinary,” she said. “Something that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for us humans.”

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/climate/atlantic-ocean-tipping-point.html

Canada Offers Lesson in the Economic Toll of Climate Change

Wildfires are hurting many industries and could strain households across Canada, one of many countries reckoning with the impact of extreme weather.

By Lydia DePillis, The New York Times, July 3, 2023

Canada’s wildfires have burned 20 million acres, blanketed Canadian and U.S. cities with smoke and raised health concerns on both sides of the border, with no end in sight. The toll on the Canadian economy is only beginning to sink in.

The fires have upended oil and gas operations, reduced available timber harvests, dampened the tourism industry and imposed uncounted costs on the national health system.

Those losses are emblematic of the pressure being felt more widely as countries around the world experience disaster after disaster caused by extreme weather, and they will only increase as the climate warms.

What long seemed a faraway concern has snapped into sharp relief in recent years, as billowing smoke has suffused vast areas of North America, floods have washed away neighborhoods and heat waves have strained power grids. That incurs billions of dollars in costs, and has longer-reverberating consequences, such as insurers withdrawing from markets prone to hurricanes and fires.

In some early studies of the economic impact of rising temperatures, Canada appeared to be better positioned than countries closer to the Equator; warming could allow for longer farming seasons and make more places attractive to live in as winters grow less harsh. But it is becoming clear that increasing volatility — ice storms followed by fires followed by intense rains and now hurricanes on the Atlantic coast, uncommon so far north — wipes out any potential gains.

“It’s come on faster than we thought, even informed people,” said Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute. “You couldn’t model this out if you tried. We’ve always been concerned about this escalation of damages, but seeing it happen is so stark.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Sawyer and his colleagues did try to model it out. In a report last year, they calculated that climate-related costs would mount to 25 billion Canadian dollars in 2025, cutting economic growth in half. By midcentury, they forecast a loss of 500,000 jobs, mostly from excessive heat that lowers labor productivity and causes premature death. Then there are the increased costs to households and higher taxes required to support government spending to repair the damage — especially in the north, where thawing permafrost is cracking roads and buildings.

It is too early to know the cost for the current fires, and several months of fire season remain. But the consulting firm Oxford Economics has forecast that it could knock between 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points off Canada’s economic growth in the third quarter — a big hit, especially since hiring in the country has already slowed and households have more debt and less savings than their neighbors to the south.

“We already think we’re teetering into a downturn, and this would just make things worse,” said Tony Stillo, director of economics for Canada at Oxford. “If we were to see these fires really disrupt transportation corridors, disrupting power supply to large population centers, then you’re talking about even worse consequences.”

Estimates of the overall economic drag are built on damage to particular industries, which vary with each disaster.

The recent fires have left some lumber mills idle, for example, as workers have been evacuated. It’s not clear how widespread the damage will be to forest stocks, but provincial governments tend to reduce the amount of timber they allow to be harvested after large blazes, according to Derek Nighbor, chief executive of the Forest Products Association of Canada. Infestations of pine beetles, which have flared up as milder winter temperatures fail to kill off the pests, have curtailed logging in British Columbia.

Although lumber prices have been depressed in recent months as higher interest rates have weighed on home construction, Canada is confronting a housing shortage as it works to bring in millions of new immigrants. Reduced availability of wood will make its housing problem more difficult to solve.

“It’s safe to say there’s going to be a supply crunch in Canada as we work through this,” Mr. Nighbor said.

The tourism industry is also being hit, as the fires erupted just as operators were going into the crucial summer season — sometimes far from the fires. Business plunged in the peninsula town of Tofino, a popular destination for whale watching off Vancouver Island, when its only highway access was cut off by a fire two hours away. The road has since reopened, but only one lane at a time, and drivers need to wait up to an hour to get through.

Sabrina Donovan is the general manager of the Pacific Sands Beach Resort and the chair of Tofino’s local tourism promotion organization. She said that her hotel’s occupancy sank to about 20 percent from 85 percent in the course of June, and that few bookings were coming through for the rest of the year. Employers commonly house their staff during the summer, but after weeks without customers, many workers left for jobs elsewhere, making it difficult to maintain full service in the coming months.

“This most recent fire has been pretty devastating for the majority of the community,” Ms. Donovan said, noting that the coast had never in her career had to deal with wildfires. “This is something we now have to be thinking about in the future.”

Regardless of the severity of any particular episode, the costs mount as disasters get closer to critical infrastructure and population centers. That is why the two most expensive years in recent history were 2013, when major flooding hit Calgary, and 2016, when the Fort McMurray fire wiped out 2,400 homes and businesses and hamstrung oil and gas production, the area’s main economic driver.

This year, most of the burning has been in rural areas. While some oil drilling has been disrupted, the damage overall to the oil industry has been minor. The greater long-term threat to the industry is falling demand for fossil fuels, which could displace 312,000 to 450,000 workers in the next three decades, according to an analysis by TD Bank.

But there is still a long, hot summer ahead. And the insurance industry is on alert, having watched the increasing damage in recent years with alarm. Before 2009, insured losses in Canada averaged around 450 million Canadian dollars a year, and now they routinely exceed $2 billion. Large reinsurers pulled back from the Canadian market after several crippling payouts, increasing prices for homeowners and businesses. That is not even counting the life insurance costs likely to be incurred by excessive heat and smoke-related respiratory ailments.

Craig Stewart, vice president of federal affairs for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said climate issues had become a primary concern for the organization over the past decade.

“Back in 2015, we sent our C.E.O. across the country to talk about the need to prepare for a different climate future,” Mr. Stewart said. “At the time, we had the Calgary floods two years before in the rearview mirror. We thought, ‘Oh, we’ll get another event in two to three years.’ We never could’ve imagined that we’re now seeing two or three catastrophic events in the country per year.”

That’s why the industry pushed hard for the Canadian government to come up with a comprehensive adaptation strategy, which was released in late June. It recommends measures like investing in urban forests to reduce the health effects of heat waves and developing better flood maps that help people avoid building in vulnerable areas. Fire and forestry experts have called for the forest service, decimated by years of austerity, to be restored, and prescribed burns to be scaled up — all of which costs a lot of money.

Mike Savage, the mayor of Halifax, doesn’t have to be convinced that the spending is necessary. His city was the largest to sustain fire losses this spring, with 151 homes burned. That calamity came on the heels of Hurricane Fiona last year, which submerged much of the coastline. Mr. Savage worries about the fate of the isthmus that connects Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, and the power systems that now peak in the hot summer instead of the frigid winter.

“I certainly believe that when you invest in mitigation there’s a dramatic positive impact from those investments,” Mr. Savage said. “It’s going to be a challenging time. To think we got through this fire and say, ‘OK, that’s good, we’re done,’ that would be a little bit naïve.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/business/economy/canada-wildfires-economy.html?searchResultPosition=1

Bipartisan bill would lay groundwork for U.S. carbon tariffs

By Emma Dumain, E&E News, June 8, 2023

Senators from both parties have signed on to legislation that would calculate the emissions intensity of industrial materials produced in the United States.

It’s a necessary step, advocates say, toward a carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, that would slap tariffs on carbon-intensive imports.

“We need our own math,” said George David Banks, a conservative climate adviser and former climate official in the Trump administration. “The Europeans are moving forward with their own CBAM … and [they] will come up with our own math for us.”

But the effort in the Senate also underscores the challenges lawmakers face in creating a climate trade policy to harmonize with the European Union: Of the myriad CBAM frameworks currently under development on Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle, a bill that would just mandate a study is so far the only measure that has been able to attract bipartisan consensus.

“It’s easier to take a second step once you’ve taken a first step,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “It can create a little momentum, but at the very least it creates a baseline from which to work, and it gets people thinking about it in a different context than, ‘Oh, my God, it’s a carbon tax.’”

Cramer, with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), on Wednesday introduced the “Providing Reliable, Objective, Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency (PROVE IT) Act.”

The bill would require the Department of Energy to study and determine the emissions intensity of nearly two dozen products made in the United States and by G-7 countries, free-trade agreement partners, foreign countries of concern and “countries that hold a substantial global market share for a covered product.”

The list of “covered products” would include aluminum, iron, steel, plastic, crude oil, lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.

The Energy Department would have two years to compile a report on its findings, in consultation with EPA, the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce and State departments. An update of the data would have to be published every five years.

“Studying emissions intensity is not easy; it will take some time, it is complex, and, in particular, figuring out a fair process for imposing tariffs on countries that don’t have any transparency around their emissions is also going to be a complex part of any border carbon adjustment mechanism,” Coons said Wednesday.

“So given there’s a bipartisan group that was interested in moving forward on this, I thought it was important that we introduce this piece and lay the foundation for the rest of the conversation.”

Coons has introduced more comprehensive CBAM proposals in the past, while Cramer confirmed this week he is continuing to work on crafting a “trade deal” that could be reconciled with what the European countries are already doing.

Joining Coons and Cramer as original co-sponsors of the bill are Sens. Angus King (I-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.)., Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

Whitehouse is another longtime sponsor of CBAM legislation, proposing bills in previous Congress sessions that would have imposed a domestic price on carbon — something that might be necessary for ensuring a CBAM’s enforceability by the World Trade Organization but has long been politically divisive and not currently a part of the conversation in Congress.

Cassidy told E&E News on Wednesday that he was looking at “early July” for introduction of what is expected to be the first comprehensive, Republican-led CBAM bill, which he will call the “Foreign Pollution Act.”

‘Wise and prudent’

In brief interviews, both Cassidy and Whitehouse said the “PROVE IT Act” would in no way impede separate legislative efforts or pursuits of more comprehensive policies.

“It’s a very nice lead to what we’ve been talking about — a very nice lead — because in our legislation we’ll specify a role for the national labs in terms of establishing pollution intensity for various products,” Cassidy said.

“The focus on the border tariff is the key, and the E.U. CBAM is coming at us one way or another, so that will provide a significant forcing event, and this adds information,” Whitehouse agreed. “It’s a fairly small thing, we can move quickly, we can get more information, and that’s — it’s all good.”

One reason the CBAM concept has gained so much traction among conservatives is that there’s more to it than just a mechanism to fight global emissions and beat the climate crisis: It also would punish other countries, like China, that are producing goods with higher carbon intensities than the United States without consequences.

Whitehouse and Coons have both suggested that language related to a carbon tariff could make its way into a legislative package to boost U.S. competitiveness with China — a follow-up to last year’s CHIPS and Science Act. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants Democrats and Republicans to work on the package together.

But it’s not clear whether the blueprints from Whitehouse, Coons, Cassidy and Cramer will align in time to become a part of “CHIPS 2.0,” nor is it certain there will even be a “CHIPS 2.0” to include it.

In the meantime, the “PROVE IT Act” can fill a necessary void while fulfilling a necessary function, said Greg Bertelsen, CEO of the Climate Leadership Council, which is working with congressional offices on CBAM proposals.

For one thing, he said, mandating a study of U.S. products’ carbon intensity that would take two years from the date of enactment of the bill could actually take care of an important part of the equation while members of Congress reconcile their disagreements on the larger issues.

For another, he continued, the “PROVE IT Act” responds not only to a practical need but also a desire from lawmakers.

“I’ve met with more than one Republican office who is interested in this space but watching with some concern as the E.U. develops their CBAM and recognizing that U.S. exporters are going to be subject to a program — and an adjustment — determined by the E.U. regulators” Bertelsen explained.

“The Republican members I’ve met with, their view is the U.S. should have its own opinion about what the carbon intensity of our products are.”

To Bertelsen’s point, Murkowski told E&E News she had signed on to the bill for the very purpose of learning more.

“Whether it’s something that would move us in the direction [of] — whether it’s the price on carbon or the border adjustment … I think it’s going to be important to know a little bit more about of the impact of all this,” she said.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/bipartisan-bill-would-lay-groundwork-for-u-s-carbon-tariffs/

Electric vehicles appeal to conservative buyers sick of gas guzzlers

A few red counties in Texas are experiencing higher-than-average EV growth, as drivers tire of gas prices and chase the latest tech

By Jeanne Whalen, The Washington Post, June 5, 2023

PLANO, Tex. — Tony Federico bought his Tesla Model 3 in 2018. A former Marine who votes Republican, Federico said he was drawn by the cool technology and the chance to save money on gas.

“I think selfishly it was, you know, how is this going to help my pocketbook,” he said from his living room one recent morning. Environmental concerns were “not really” on his radar, said the head of the local Tesla owners club.

Electric vehicles are often associated with liberal coastal types who speak of saving the planet. But in this Republican stronghold north of Dallas, more and more people are deciding that driving an EV is just common sense.

In Collin County, home to Plano, EV market share is well above the national average and growing fast, reaching 8.7 percent of new-vehicle registrations last year, according to S&P Global Mobility. In neighboring Denton County, also reliably red, EVs grew to 7.3 percent of the market. Nationwide, electric cars were about 6.2 percent of new-vehicle registrations last year.

Battle to dethrone Tesla heats up just as Musk is distracted by Twitter

Some EV buyers in the Plano area expressed concern about the climate, but most said they were drawn by the performance, style and high-tech features of the vehicles — and the convenience and savings of avoiding the gas pump.

“I used to drive a Mercedes-Benz SUV and I went to go fill up my gas tank and it was over $4 for premium gas. So I went the very next day, and I traded it in for an electric vehicle,” said Kate Allen, sitting in her Model 3, sipping iced coffee while she charged. The possibility of helping the environment was a “bonus” — not her main motivation, she added.

Allen, a Republican voter who lives in nearby Frisco, works as a property manager in Dallas’s Uptown neighborhood. A year ago, hers was the only EV parked at one of the residential buildings she manages. Now there are half a dozen.

For the Biden administration, it doesn’t really matter why drivers choose EVs, so long as they choose them. Rapidly scaling up EV adoption is a centerpiece of the administration’s green-energy agenda, which is using tax credits and other incentives to try to make plug-in vehicles account for half of new vehicle sales by 2030. Hitting that target would mean reducing U.S. greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions by up to 9 percent by 2030, according to Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

Nationwide, most of the counties with the highest EV uptake are predictably blue and often high-income, but pockets of red are springing up. Florida’s St. Johns County, home to St. Augustine; Indiana’s Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis; North Carolina’s Union County, southeast of Charlotte; New Jersey’s seaside Monmouth County; and California’s Kern County, home to Bakersfield, are among the areas that voted for Trump in 2020 and had higher-than-average EV market-share growth last year, S&P data shows.

Conservative support for green energy isn’t a totally new phenomenon, says Neal Farris, a left-leaning photographer and EV enthusiast in Dallas who promotes the vehicles at auto shows and Earth Day events. “One of the people I quote a lot is T. Boone Pickens,” he said, referring to the oil billionaire and longtime Republican donor who embraced renewable energy late in life. “He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do solar, let’s do wind, because if we do, then the oil will last longer.’”

To be sure, there are plenty of regions in Texas where EV skepticism remains high and chargers are tough to find. Federico volunteers with a Christian ministry group that visits prisoners near small-town Palestine, Tex., and he makes sure to charge up at home before driving. “I couldn’t plug in there if I wanted to,” he said.

And the powerful oil and gas lobby still holds a lot of sway in the state, said Tom “Smitty” Smith, head of the Texas Electric Transportation Resources Alliance.

But even some Republican lawmakers who have long supported the oil-and-gas industry have begun sponsoring a few bills that favor EVs, partly because their wealthy constituents are buying the cars, Smith said. “They are seeing [EVs] all over the Republican communities,” he said. “And they are seeing them with people who are seen as political and intellectual leaders in their communities.”

One Republican-sponsored bill recently signed by Gov. Greg Abbott fast-tracks infrastructure upgrades to support charging, among other things. Another awaiting the governor’s signature would ensure that public chargers clearly post their pricing. A third recently signed into law, however, creates a $400 registration fee for EV drivers and a $200 annual renewal fee thereafter, to recoup money that drivers aren’t paying through gasoline taxes.

Buzz Smith, an electric advocate in Fort Worth who calls himself “The EVangelist,” said he has had executives from Exxon and other oil companies approach him at auto shows and whisper their interest in electrification. “They say they are retiring and their next car will be an EV,” he said.

In some Dallas-area households, electric vehicles are now sharing garages with gas-fired pickup trucks. That’s often true on a national level, too. Ford F-series trucks are the top garage mate for the Mustang Mach-E and three other electric cars in the United States, while Chevy’s Silverado truck is the most common garage mate for the Bolt EV, according to S&P Global Mobility.

Greg Nipper, a tech-industry manager who lives in north Dallas, bought a Tesla Model 3 in 2018, parking it at home next to his Ford F-150 pickup. Soon, he decided to ditch the truck.

“I’ve always been a pickup person, but the enjoyment of driving that [Tesla] was enough that I traded my pickup for a second Model 3,” said Nipper, a registered Democrat who has voted more Republican in recent elections. The convenience of charging at home also won him over. “No oil change, no going to the gas station. Simply plug in at night and wake up with a full charge.”

The prevalence of software, semiconductor and telecom companies in the area north of Dallas means there are plenty of well-heeled buyers eager for the latest technology.

Federico, who works in the IT industry, has seen the number of electric vehicles balloon since he bought one. Waiting at a red light one recent morning, after dropping his daughter off at school, he counted more than a dozen Teslas whizzing by. “There’s a Y. There’s a 3. There’s a 3, There’s a Y,” he pointed, ticking them off in the 90 seconds before the light changed.

In his spare time, Federico runs a local Tesla owners club that meets up for social events or coffee hangouts at charging stations. Gathering on the top floor of a Plano parking garage on a recent morning, club members chatted about their cars and passed out club information to other Tesla owners who were killing time while charging.

The drivers mostly swapped stories about the rapid growth of EVs and chargers in their area, but also a few reminders that they are still in Texas.

Dressed in a Tesla Cyber Truck hat and a “My Car Runs on Sunshine” T-shirt, club member John Packer said it is not uncommon for EV drivers to encounter antisocial or passive aggressive behavior. Sometimes gas-powered pickup trucks park in front of charging stations, even when plenty of other spots are available, just to block them. “There is a challenge, because this is an oil state,” said Packer, a Democrat who drives a Model Y and owns a logistics company that uses 16 electric Rivian vans for deliveries.

On a national level, the top dozen counties for EV market-share growth last year were all in California, according to S&P data, followed by counties near Seattle, D.C., Boulder, Colo., New York and Portland, Ore.

Travis County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Austin, is the Lone Star state’s top county for EV market-share growth, ranking 28th nationally. But the next two Texas counties, ranking 43 and 52, are Collin and Denton, which have long voted red and supported Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections.

In Denton County, one entrepreneur and his partner are so pro-electrification that they’ve started a small business converting classic cars into EVs.

Bill Schofield, a two-time Trump voter who describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, got interested in EVs a decade ago, when he was among the first 2,000 customers to buy a Tesla Model S.

Schofield didn’t think the vehicles were going to help the environment much, and he still doesn’t. He was chasing the latest technology.

“I think the Democrats think they’re saving the planet, because they didn’t do the real math to see that — oh, no, they’re not,” he said. “The Republicans and conservatives, they bought it because it was the cool new technology.”

After falling in love with his Tesla’s performance and high-tech perks, Schofield bought an electric Porsche Taycan and an electrified Mercedes EQS, with the tidy sum he made selling his electrical distribution business. He also started the business converting classic cars, which he now runs with his colleague, Kevin Emr.

In their roadside garage in Denton, they showed off a dozen vintage cars they are overhauling — a 1965 Shelby Cobra, a 1968 Camaro, a 1959 Corvette — by swapping out the gasoline engines for electric motors and batteries. The switch makes them drive beautifully, with all the torque and power of a modern electric vehicle and little of the rattling and glitchiness of an old gasoline car, they said.

“If you’ve driven [an EV], you’ve realized how convenient they are to own and drive,” said Emr, an engineer and racecar driver who has a Rivian SUV on order. His father-in-law, a longtime Ford driver who favored pickup trucks and SUVs, recently bought Ford’s electric Mustang Mach E. “No more gas station trips, no more oil changes. No more maintenance, no drips in your garage, no smells. Everything just works.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/05/ev-conservative-buyer-uptick/

The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring.

Op-ed by Brian Deese, The New York Times, May 30, 2023

Deese was the director of the National Economic Council for the first two years of the Biden administration and helped shape the Inflation Reduction Act.

Last summer, in a meeting with business and labor leaders as Congress prepared to vote on the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden argued that it would result in “the largest investment ever in clean energy and American energy security — the largest in our history.” He added, “It will be the largest investment in American manufacturing as well.”

Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The law is doing exactly what it was designed to do: encourage private investment in clean energy. Tax incentives make the investments attractive, but businesses, along with rural cooperatives, nonprofits and others, must judge whether investing their own money in a hydrogen factory or a wind farm will pay off. In the end, the law will be only as successful as their appetite to invest at a scale that will meaningfully reduce emissions warming the planet and increase the nation’s energy security.

Over the past few months, we have begun to see how large that appetite may be. It seems clear already that the law will stimulate significantly more investment in clean energy than was at first thought possible while generating more revenue from high-income taxpayers to reduce the deficit.

But despite all the encouraging signs, still more needs to be done to achieve the nation’s climate goals and energy needs. For instance, the often cumbersome and time-consuming process of siting and building clean energy projects must be streamlined. And Congress needs to take additional steps to reduce emissions from heavy industries like steel, cement and chemicals.

But let’s first see how far the country has come since the I.R.A. became law. Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. That is more than in the prior four years combined. The pipeline of battery plants amounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021 and enough to power nearly 20 million homes.

Scott Moskowitz, the head of market strategy and public affairs for Qcells North America, which manufactures solar panel components in Georgia, summed up the impact of the law this way: “We will always look at the history of our industry in two eras now that the Inflation Reduction Act has passed” — meaning the before and the after.

“The I.R.A. contains some of the most ambitious clean energy manufacturing incentives enacted anywhere in the world,” Mr. Moskowitz said.

The investment appetite is defying geographic and political boundaries. From Oklahoma and Ohio to North Carolina and Nevada, new investment is breathing economic life into communities that have seen their economies decline. This is in part because the I.R.A. provides an explicit incentive to invest in places with contaminated industrial sites, communities with a significant economic reliance on traditional fossil fuel production or those with shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants.

The investment surge has prompted forecasters to significantly update their views on the long-term potential of the law. Analysts at two research organizations, the Brookings Institution and the Rhodium Group, have estimated that over 10 years, private investment could be at least one and a half to three times as much as initial projections. The largest increase is projected to be in industrial and manufacturing activity for hydrogen, carbon capture, energy storage and critical minerals — areas key to long-term energy security.

This overall investment wave has the potential to drive a more rapid and efficient decarbonization of the economy while increasing the supply of clean energy and maintaining the country’s competitive edge of stable, low-cost energy. Rhodium, for example, along with researchers from the University of Chicago, found that I.R.A. energy production tax credits would lower energy costs for consumers and businesses while reducing power sector carbon dioxide emissions at an average cost of $33 to $50 per metric ton — considerably less than recent estimates of the social cost of carbon, the economic damage that would result from emitting additional carbon.

But these early encouraging signs do not guarantee long-term success. The law did not provide all the necessary tools to achieve national goals for expanding our supply of clean energy. Congress and the Biden administration have more work to do.

First, lawmakers must make it easier to build clean energy infrastructure in America. Congress should immediately go beyond the permitting provisions included in the recently announced debt limit compromise bill and pass comprehensive legislation to speed energy development, an idea that has bipartisan support. The administration should use its authority to streamline project timelines. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should more aggressively clear backlogs preventing clean energy projects from connecting to the grid. Policymakers should consider new incentives to expand energy capacity, like conditioning federal assistance to states and localities that reform land-use policies to allow clean energy development.

Second, lawmakers should continue to encourage efficient, low-carbon investments. For example, Congress could develop an industrial competitiveness program for heavy industries like cement, steel and chemicals that includes an emissions-based border adjustment fee on imported industrial goods from countries with less ambitious emissions controls. This would bolster the I.R.A.’s incentives, increase the competitiveness of American industries and address China’s nonmarket practices in these areas, such as flooding the market with products at far below their fair value.

Third, we need to work with allies across developed and emerging markets to build a cooperative international framework around the I.R.A.’s investment incentives. Our allies have little to fear and much to gain from working with the United States to expand incentives domestically to deploy clean energy technology because it must be deployed everywhere, and the I.R.A. incentives will drive down the global cost of energy technologies. The administration has already forged agreements to harmonize these incentives with the European Union, Japan and Canada but will need to use all levers of its foreign policy to secure cooperative arrangements to build resilient energy supply chains, particularly for critical minerals.

Fourth, policymakers and the public need better tools to close the gap between splashy corporate clean energy announcements and speculative long-term projections to understand where investments are being made and what they are achieving.

Finally, policymakers should remain vigilant about budgetary effects. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the private sector’s enthusiasm for the I.R.A.’s clean energy incentives could increase the cost to the federal budget by about $200 billion over 10 years.

But that is only part of the overall calculation. The I.R.A. is about more than just clean energy. It also includes corporate tax increases and reductions in prescription drug spending by Medicare. That’s why the I.R.A. overall is still projected to reduce the deficit over 10 years, with the reduction growing to $50 billion a year by 2032.

Recent academic research has shown that the long-term deficit reduction could be much greater than these estimates anticipate, with the I.R.A.’s innovative investments in technology and audit capacity generating about $500 billion and potentially much more over the next decade. While it is a mistake to undercut those investments, the savings are achievable even with the rescissions to Internal Revenue Service funding included in the debt limit compromises.

If we build on the I.R.A.’s investment-driven model, the optimistic outcome of more clean energy, more economic potential and a stronger fiscal future is within reach.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/opinion/climate-clean-energy-investment.html

'More likely than not' world will soon see 1.5C of warming - WMO

By Gloria Dickie, Reuters, May 17, 2023

LONDON, May 17 (Reuters) - For the first time ever, global temperatures are now more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday.

This does not mean the world would cross the long-term warming threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But a year of warming at 1.5C could offer a glimpse of what crossing that longer term threshold, based on the 30-year global average, would be like.

With a 66% chance of temporarily reaching 1.5C by 2027, "it's the first time in history that it's more likely than not that we will exceed 1.5C," said Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre, who worked on the WMO's latest Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update.

Last year's report put the odds at about 50-50.

Even temporarily reaching 1.5C is "an indication that as we start having these years with 1.5C happening more and more often, than we are getting closer to having the actual long-term climate be on that threshold," said Leon Hermanson, also of the Met Office Hadley Centre.

It also means the world has failed to make sufficient progress on slashing climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Partially responsible for boosting the chance of soon hitting 1.5C is an El Niño weather pattern expected to develop in the coming months. During El Niño, warmer waters in the tropical Pacific heat the atmosphere above, lifting global temperatures.

The El Niño "will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory", said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press statement.

A mid-year switch to El Niño is worrying scientists across the world. The weather phenomenon, while distinct from climate change, is likely to boost extremes and bring warmer weather to North America and drought to South America, with the Amazon at greater risk of bad fires.

The likelihood of temporarily exceeding 1.5C has increased over time. Scientists had estimated just a 10% chance of hitting 1.5C between 2017 and 2021, for example.

Unlike the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate projections, which are based on future greenhouse gas emissions, the WMO update provides more of a prediction-based long-range weather forecast.

The WMO also found a 98% chance that one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, surpassing 2016 which saw a global temperature impacted by about 1.3C (2.3F) of warming.

"This report must be a rallying cry to intensify global efforts to tackle the climate crisis," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace UK.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-likely-than-not-world-will-soon-see-15c-warming-wmo-2023-05-17/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=051723