Three East Coast Wind Farms Breeze to Court Victories

Wind farms were on the verge of providing electricity to millions of homes along the East Coast. The projects had generated tens of thousands of jobs and promised to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

But President Donald Trump despises wind power and, in December, his administration issued stop-work orders for five East Coast wind farms that were under construction. 

His animosity dates back to the time when turbines, which he called “monsters,” were proposed off the coast of Scotland in sight of his Aberdeenshire golf course. He went before the Scottish Parliament in an unsuccessful attempt to block their construction. Trump derides wind farms as “losers” that lose money, destroy the landscape and kill birds.

The president also contends that they pose a national security threat. His administration argued in court that wind turbine blade movement can interfere with radar. New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) termed that a “bogus pretense,” adding, “When I heard this, I said one thing: I’m the governor of New York. If there is a national security threat off the coast of New York, you need to tell me what it is. I want a briefing right now. Well, lo and behold, they had no answer.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said wind projects are “bad for everybody.”

Workers are now back on the job at three of those offshore sites, thanks to rulings by federal judges. On January 12, a judge said that work could resume on Revolution Wind, which will power 350,000 homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island. 

Three days later, District Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump appointee, ruled that construction on the Empire Wind project could go forward offshore from Long Island, N.Y., while he considers the merits of the government’s order to suspend the project.

Twenty-four hours later, a third wind farm got a green light. Federal Judge Jamar Walker allowed the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Commercial Project to temporarily keep building. 

Meantime, Orsted is suing over the pause of its Sunrise Wind project for New York, with a hearing still to be set. The fifth paused project is Vineyard Wind, under construction in Massachusetts. 

Pointing to the upheaval for Orsted’s Revolution Wind, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a champion of the oil and gas industry, said, “You have this project that has been underway for years, millions of dollars, 80 percent complete, and then you have, ‘Sorry, that’s not on our approved list,’” she said.

“OK, now we’re back on. But what is the message that is sent to Ørsted? What is the message that is sent to any of these companies about the reliability of working on a project in the United States?” she continued. “I worry about that.”

In contrast, as Claire Brown and Brad Plumer reported in The New York Times, “Over the past eight months, the Energy Department has taken the extraordinary step of ordering that generators at five coal-burning power plants that had been headed for retirement stay open and keep running. That’s just the beginning, officials say.”

Trump has expressed “a certain affection for the fuel,” Brown and Plumer wrote, calling it “beautiful clean coal” even though it is the dirtiest of fossil fuels and a major driver of global warming.

If Congress could find the will and energy to put a price on carbon, it would be easier to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. Urge your senators and House member to take that important step.

Trump administration dismantling climate and weather research center

Climate scientists around the globe were stunned to hear on December 15 that the Trump administration was breaking up one of the world’s preeminent Earth and atmospheric research institutions. The reason? It was promoting “climate alarmism.”

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), based in Boulder, Colorado, was created in 1960 to conduct research and educate future scientists. Many of the big advances in weather prediction originated at the center, the University of California’s Daniel Swain told The Washington Post.

Those advances include severe weather warnings, the reduced harm from those earlier warnings and looking at the economic impacts of what tomorrow’s weather or weather a few days from now might bring, Swain explained.

NCAR research has played a leading role in improving weather forecasting. Three-day forecasts have been more than 80-percent accurate since the 1980s and are now about 97-percent accurate; five-day forecasts hit the 80-percent threshold in the early 2000s, and seven-day forecasts are approaching it today. 

“Human-caused changes in the global climate have fundamentally changed the weather, making extreme conditions not only possible but also more likely,” Michelle Nijhuis wrote in The Atlantic. “Without ongoing research on climate change, forecasters would be less able to predict deadly weather events such as last week’s flooding in the Pacific Northwest…”

The center is “quite literally our global mothership,” Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, wrote on X. 

According to the White House, the administration plans to identify and eliminate what it calls "green new scam research activities" during an upcoming review of the center, while "vital functions" such as weather modeling and supercomputing will be moved to another entity or location. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who announced the decision, said that “a comprehensive review is underway.” But why not complete that review before shutting down such an esteemed research center?

Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been vocal in his concern over climate alarmism and the politicization of climate science and weather disasters. Though he considers NCAR far from perfect, Pielke told USA TODAY that it’s “a crown jewel of the U.S. scientific enterprise and deserves to be improved, not shuttered. If the U.S. is going to be a global leader in the atmospheric sciences, then it cannot afford to make petty and vindictive decisions based on the hot politics of climate change.” 

NCAR plays a unique role in the scientific community by bringing together otherwise siloed specialists to collaborate on some of the biggest climate and weather questions of our time, Caspar Ammann, a former research scientist at the center, told The Washington Post.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) said, “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”

The New York Times noted that President Trump “routinely mocks climate change as a hoax and his administration has labeled virtually all efforts to study climate change, reduce the level of dangerous greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or protect communities from the impacts of global warming as ‘alarmism.’”

We're Paying Billions for Damage Linked to Climate Change

Through the first six months of this year, disasters across the United States caused more than $100 billion in damage, the most expensive start to any year on record, according to a report released October 22 by Climate Central. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of the year.

More than half of the costs from extreme weather so far this year stem from the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January. Severe storms — which brought tornadoes, hail and floods to much of the country — accounted for the rest of the nationwide damage. 

The total does not include the July 4 floods that struck central Texas, killing at least 136 people. 

The average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged from three per year during the 1980s to 19 annually during the last 10 years, the data show. Annual costs, which are inflation-adjusted using the Consumer Price Index, typically reached the tens of billions in the 1990s and rose to a high of $182.7 billion last year. 

Climate Central began overseeing the database this spring after the Trump administration directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to stop updating its database.  Adam Smith led management of the federal database for 15 years but took early retirement in May, shortly after the Trump administration said it would stop reporting disaster damage costs. The government had maintained that database since the 1990s, with data going back to 1980. 

Smith is continuing the work at the nonprofit Climate Central, where he is the senior climate impacts scientist. He is using the same methodology that NOAA did and, according to New York Times reporter Scott Dance, plans to eventually gather even more detailed disaster data. The research relies on data from insurance companies and other sources, some of which is proprietary, to tally up total losses. “This data set was simply too important to stop being updated,” Smith told Dance. 

CNN reported that “the choice to discontinue the database was in keeping with the Trump administration’s focus on cutting climate change datasets and programs across federal agencies.” 

NOAA spokeswoman Kim Doster said that her agency ”appreciates” that the database found “a funding mechanism other than the taxpayer dime” as NOAA focuses on “sound, unbiased research over projects based in uncertainty and speculation.” 

Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of disaster relief and recovery from the federal government onto states. The administration has created a panel that is expected to recommend changes to the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates by the end of November. 

Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate change’s effects on communities, told The Times that the database serves as a powerful signal of both changing weather extremes and “decision making that is costing us a lot of money.”

The billion-dollar-disaster list “has been one of the most effective bridges to the public communicating the increasing costs of disasters,” Rumbach said. “It’s a really powerful tool for communicating to the public this trend we see.”

Pricing carbon would be a sensible way to speed the transition away from fossil fuels and thus reduce the number of disasters and their cost.

Endangerment Finding Is Endangered

What’s next in EPA’s efforts to withdraw its 2009 Endangerment Finding, which concluded that six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane from vehicles, pose a threat to public health and welfare? The finding was supported by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, affirming that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. 

EPA announced its intention in July, contending that subsequent research had “cast significant doubt” on the accuracy of the Endangerment Finding and setting a September 22 deadline for public comments. On the eve of that deadline, the Federal Register reported that EPA had received more than 140,000 comments. Now the agency must analyze them and decide its next steps.

A week before the deadline, the nation’s leading scientific advisory body issued a major report contradicting the administration’s claims and marshaling the strongest evidence to date that carbon dioxide, methane and other planet-warming greenhouse gases are threatening human health. The report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, concludes that the original endangerment finding was accurate and “has stood the test of time.” It says that there is now even stronger evidence that rising greenhouse gas levels can threaten public health and well-being, and that new risks have been uncovered. “The United States,” it said, “faces a future in which climate-induced harm continues to worsen and today’s extremes become tomorrow’s norms.”

Critics of EPA’s proposed withdrawal of the finding included 102 lawmakers, led by Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA). They wrote to EPA to urge reconsideration of its proposal. "This is a clear abdication of EPA's core mission to protect human health and the environment and a flagrant rejection of Congressional intent," the letter said.

The New York Times’ Brad Plumer reported that the EPA proposal is “one of President Donald Trump’s most significant steps yet to derail federal climate efforts. If the move is held up in court, future administrations would have no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.”

In response to the report, EPA spokeswoman Carolyn Holran, said, “The endangerment finding has been used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines. As we saw in the 16 intervening years since the endangerment finding was made, many of the extremely pessimistic predictions and assumptions E.P.A. relied upon have not materialized as expected.”

As it moves ahead, will EPA simply dismiss the National Academies’ strongly worded report? Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, told The Times, “Courts are going to be very leery if the E.P.A. tries to ignore or reject the findings of the National Academies of Sciences.”

Drought poses major threat to the food we eat

Widespread drought is “looming over what people around the world eat,” The New York Times reported recently, and “the wider societal risks of drought are drawing increasing attention.”

In the Midwest, for example, years of poor rains have led ranchers to cull cattle herds, and herd numbers are at their lowest in 70 years. The result: Beef prices have climbed to their highest levels ever.

In China, one of the nation’s key wheat-producing regions, the Yellow River Basin, is withering under unusually hot, dry conditions. Germany had its driest spring since 1931, though subsequent rains have eased concerns somewhat about its wheat and barley crops. 

Brazil, which accounts for 40 percent of global coffee cultivation, has experienced its worst drought in four decades, parching coffee farms and driving up prices worldwide. Last year hot, dry weather also hit Vietnam, the world’s second-largest coffee producer. 

The European Central Bank estimated in a study published in late May that droughts threatened to wipe out nearly 15 percent of the bloc’s economic output, with the greatest risk to agriculture in Southern Europe.

Water stress affects 30 percent of the population every year in the 27 countries of the European Union, and that is expected to worsen as the world warms, the bloc’s environmental agency said in a study. Agriculture is the biggest water user in Europe and is therefore among the sectors most vulnerable to water stress. Heat and drought is already endangering one of the most coveted crops of the Mediterranean: olives.

Corn yields dropped 70 percent across Zimbabwe, causing consumer prices to double. Thousands of cattle were lost to thirst and starvation.  The Amazon Basin and Mexico also have been hit by drought.

Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and generating more extreme weather. Droughts can be particularly risky, The Times’ Somini Sengupta pointed out, as the production of important foods becomes increasingly concentrated geographically. A report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water concluded that half the world’s food production is in areas where water availability is projected to decline.

Noting “how interconnected our global economies and food supplies are,” Paula Guastello, a researcher at the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), told Grist, “Drought has widespread implications, especially when it occurs on such a large, intense scale as during the past few years. In today’s global society, it is impossible to ignore the effects of drought occurring in far-off lands.” She was the lead author of a recent report by NDMC and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

If the world’s eight billion people (or the nine billion the UN predicts for 2037) are going to have enough food to survive, we must take action to reduce the threat of droughts and other forms of extreme weather. An important part of the solution is to price carbon so that we can accelerate the inevitable transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Please tell your U.S. senators and your House member to put a price on carbon.