THE MOVE TO ELECTRIC VEHICLES IS IN GEAR

Transportation has now become the greatest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. So tackling the climate challenge calls for an all-out effort to retire the internal combustion engine. 

One by one, major automakers are coming to grips with that reality. General Motors said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and will pivot to battery-powered models. Volvo said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030. Ford, Volkswagen, and other manufacturers also have announced such goals. As a result, EVs are expected to account for half of all vehicles produced in the world by 2030, according to UBS Global Research, up from three to four percent today.

Tesla, of course, has dominated the landscape so far, but there are a number of cars available. As Norman Mayersohn put it in The New York Times, “Electrics are available in many sizes, shapes and prices, with models that can be basic errand-chasers or outrageous sports cars.” He listed 14, describing each one briefly. Today there are 1.8 million EVs on U.S. roads.

Is there an American EV that has the potential to woo undecided motorists and help end the nation's fascination with giant gas-guzzlers? The answer may be the Ford Mustang Mach-E, according to Karl Brauer, executive publisher of the website CarExpert, and Ivan Drury of Edmunds.com. ABC News’ Morgan Korn reported: “The slinky SUV boasts an estimated range of up to 300 miles, and the more pricey GT version posts a 0-60 mph sprint of 3.8 seconds, faster than some conventional Mustangs on the road today.” Prices start at $42,895.

It would be wise, though, to season all the enthusiasm with a dash of reality. “The consumer in the middle of America just isn’t there yet,” when it comes to switching to electric vehicles, St. Louis car dealer Brad Sowers told The Wall Street Journal. He cited the long distances many of his customers drive daily and a lack of charging infrastructure outside major cities. 

To address that shortage, President Joe Biden has proposed adding 500,000 charging stations over the next decade. Today, there are just 100,000.

Another hard reality: There are 280 million vehicles on the nation’s roads. Even if every car sold this year were electric, it would take a number of years to scrap all those that run on fossil fuels. 

It’s also important to remember that the electricity that powers EVs is coming from power plants, a sizable percentage of which are burning coal, natural gas, or oil--and thus emitting greenhouse gases. So moving those plants to renewable sources is vital.

Then there’s the challenge of obtaining enough of the raw material needed to build all the batteries. Lithium is a critical ingredient and, while deposits can be found all over the world, it’s difficult to turn them into the chemicals that power batteries, The Wall Street Journal explained. 

Finding and developing lithium is a key to success for a nation’s automakers. During her confirmation hearing, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the United States needs to manufacture more batteries at home if it wants to compete in the world's electric vehicle market. “Of the 142-lithium ion battery mega factories that are under construction,” she testified, “107 are in China. Nine are in the U.S. We can't sustain this,” she said. “We have got to lean in much more quickly.”

The country setting the EV standard is Norway. Battery electric vehicles made up 54.3 percent of all new cars sold there in 2020, up from 42.4 percent in 2019. Government policies play a large role in ramping up EV percentages. The EU has been ambitious, while the United States has moved more slowly. That should change during the Biden administration. 

One way that the administration could help is through its own fleet purchases. The federal government has 650,000 vehicles, everything from Army Humvees to Social Security Administration staff cars, NPR’s Brian Naylor reported.

By far, the largest chunk of the federal fleet, about a third, is the U.S. Postal Service's delivery trucks. In February Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced a new contract to replace many of those aging, gas-guzzling vehicles. Unfortunately, he said that only about 10 percent of those new trucks would be electric vehicles, explaining that the USPS can’t afford the additional $3 billion to $4 billion he estimates it would take to make the fleet 90-percent electric.

Short-sighted? Definitely. That’s why 17 Democratic congressmen have just introduced a bill that would provide the funds to ensure that at least 75 percent of the new fleet consists of electric or zero-emission vehicles.

Another sensible fleet target: the nation’s 65,000 transit buses. The federal government covers most of the capital costs, and if the Federal Transportation Authority paid, say, 60 percent of the cost of new diesel buses and, perhaps, 85 percent of the cost of electric or other zero-emission buses, that would be a strong incentive for cities, states, and other operators of public bus fleets to go electric. Congress should enact such a differential. Electric buses cost more than diesel buses, but they have lower maintenance and fuel costs

One sound way to accelerate the move to EVs would be an honest price on carbon emissions. That would make it more expensive to operate a car burning fossil fuels. Congress is working on a package of climate change measures, and a carbon fee should be in it.

Was Texas Storm Yet Another Product of Climate Change?

Winter Storm Uri, which delivered the lowest temperatures North Texas has seen in 72 years, proves it once and for all: Global warming is a hoax!

Actually, climate science is more complicated. And there is no consensus yet that the extreme cold that invaded the South is a result, in whole or in part, of climate change. 

But a number of scientists believe that climate change is playing a significant role. 

“There is evidence that climate change can weaken the polar vortex, which allows more chances for frigid Arctic air to ooze into the Lower 48,” University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd told USA Today.

While the vortex is a natural phenomenon, and polar vortex breakdowns happen naturally, there is likely an element of climate change at work, USA Today’s Doyle Rice wrote.

Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis, who has published a study on the phenomenon, said in 2019 that "warm temperatures in the Arctic cause the jet stream to take these wild swings, and when it swings farther south, that causes cold air to reach farther south."

The jet stream is the river of air up in the atmosphere that steers weather around. A study in 2015 in the journal Science reported that the rapid warming of the Arctic makes for a wavier jet stream, with waves that move more slowly across the globe. When that happens, cold Arctic air sometimes pours down over the U.S.

In an email to Vox, Francis said that the bitter chill is a sign of what’s to come. “The large, persistent, southward dip in the jet stream responsible for this cold invasion is likely to happen more frequently in a warming climate, as are the warmer-than-normal spells that sit alongside this dip,” Francis said.

Both extreme heat and extreme cold can happen side by side, with the meandering jet stream acting as a barrier in between, wrote Vox’s Umair Irfan. 

“The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly generational,” said Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural,” he told The Guardian. “This is happening not in spite of climate change; it’s in part due to climate change.”

Last year, Cohen co-authored a paper that found a strong uptick in winter storms in the Northeast in the decade leading up to 2018. This, Cohen and some other scientists argue, is a symptom of heating in the Arctic, occurring at a rate more than twice the global average, that is disrupting long-established climatic systems.

The crisis sounded an alarm for power systems throughout the country, Brad Plumer wrote in The New York Times. Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure. It is clear, he wrote, that global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems nationwide, including fiercer heat waves and water shortages.

“It’s essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy,” Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University, told The Times. “What makes this problem even harder is that we’re now in a world where, especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected.”

Adapting to those risks could carry a hefty price tag, Plumer noted, citing a recent study that found that the Southeast alone may need 35 percent more electric capacity by 2050 simply to deal with the known hazards of climate change.

Will we build that capacity with fossil fuels or clean energy? Every kilowatt hour we produce with fossil fuels will worsen climate change. To speed the transition to renewables, we should rely on the tool that most economists say will be the quickest, simplest, and most efficient: an honest price on carbon. Congress needs to face that reality and take action. 

Wind Power Reaches New Heights

February brought upbeat climate news from New York City: The Empire State Building and 13 other buildings owned by the Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) are now powered solely by wind.

ESRT has a portfolio of more than 10 million square feet and now ranks as the nation’s biggest real estate user of entirely renewable energy. 

To be precise, this does not mean that the 14 properties will be hooked up to wind turbines that will directly feed them electricity. Instead, as IFLScience explained, ESRT will effectively be paying for energy to be sourced from renewable sources in order to cover the electricity its properties use. The new deal will ensure that a kilowatt-hour of green energy will be added to the grid for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used in ESRT buildings. The company is buying the power from Green Mountain Energy and Direct Energy.

The energy needed to operate buildings is among the nation’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. In New York, buildings generate more than two-thirds of the city’s carbon emissions, Sarah Kaplan reported in The Washington Post.

Bottom line: ESRT will prevent the production of 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing all New York City taxis from the road for a year.

This is not the first time ESRT took a bold leadership step on climate, Kaplan noted. A decade-long “deep carbon” retrofit enabled the Empire State Building to cut its planet-warming emissions by about 40 percent. The skyscraper itself has run on renewable energy since 2011.

The move to renewable power was as much a business decision as an environmental one, said Anthony Malkin, the trust’s chief executive. Many of ESRT’s existing tenants had been asking about switching to greener energy sources. And a growing number of companies — including some that rent space in ESRT buildings — have adopted corporate sustainability initiatives that include commitments to reduce their carbon footprints. “We want to differentiate ourselves so we get better tenants at higher rents so we can outperform our competition,” Malkin told The Post. “It’s all market driven.”

This move is an important symbolic victory for renewables, said Cyndy Reynolds, commercial sales director for Green Mountain Energy. “When you have someone like ESRT who you know is going to look at every facet, whether it’s cost or reliability, and they decide to move forward … it’s not just a PR play at that point,” Reynolds told Kaplan. “It’s so important to have examples like ESRT to show the nation that renewable power options are affordable and, dare I say, competitive,” she said.

Wind is the most-used renewable energy source in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration, generating about 9 percent of the nation’s electricity last year.

Data from the financial advisory company Lazard shows that new wind power facilities are cheaper to build and operate than almost all kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure, even without government subsidies. If you factor in tax credits and other incentives, generating wind can cost as little as $9 per 1,000 kilowatt-hours, compared to at least $23 at natural gas power plants.

Meantime, New York State is moving quickly to develop wind power off its coastline. There are five projects in active development--the largest offshore wind pipeline in the nation, totaling more than 4,300 megawatts and representing nearly 50 percent of the capacity needed to meet New York’s offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035.

And there was important news about wind energy production February 3 from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. It will resume the permitting process for Vineyard Wind's proposed wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, with electricity likely to be produced by late 2023. "Offshore wind has the potential to help our nation combat climate change, improve resilience through reliable power, and spur economic development to create good-paying jobs," said BOEM Director Amanda Lefton, who was named head of the agency February 1.

While there is progress being made, the transition to clean energy would move even more quickly if the nation were to put a price on carbon. We are urging Congress to take that step and encourage you to deliver that message to those who represent you on Capitol Hill.

Cost of US Natural Disasters Broke Record in 2020

Do you know someone--maybe your congressman--who’s wringing his hands about President Biden’s proposals to invest significant sums in clean energy, green infrastructure, and other climate-related initiatives?

If you do, refer him to the report that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just issued on the cost of natural disasters last year. A record 22 weather and climate-related disasters caused damages of more than $1 billion apiece. Altogether, last year’s natural disasters in the United States accounted for $95 billion in damages (almost double the amount in 2019), killing 262 people and injuring many more, NOAA reported.

Compare the number of billion-dollars-in-damages natural disasters last year (22) to the annual average since 1980: seven.  It sounds like strong federal action is in order.

Last year featured a record number of named Atlantic storms, as well as the largest wildfires ever recorded in California. Take a look at NOAA’s graphic summarizing the year’s disasters.

“Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,” Ernst Rauch, the chief climate scientist at Munich Re, told Christopher Flavelle of The New York Times. Munich Re is one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. The insurance industry is struggling to determine risk and to price its products as extreme weather exacts a growing toll on people and property.

The 30 named Atlantic storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year. Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August. 

As Rauch explained in The Times’ story, the 2020 hurricane season was unusually devastating because climate change is making storms more likely to stall once they hit land, pumping more rain and wind into coastal towns and cities for longer periods of time.

The next costliest category of natural disasters in 2020 was convective storms, which generated $40 billion in losses. This category includes thunderstorms, derechos, tornadoes, and hailstorms. A derecho that struck Iowa and other Midwestern states in August caused almost $7 billion in damage, destroying huge amounts of corn and soybeans.

Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Fires burned more than four million acres across California, doubling the record set in 2018. The August Complex Fire burned more than one million acres, by far the most in state history, Scientific American reported. 

Last year’s fires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed, Munich Re said, but also because so much of that damage was outside of California. For example, 4,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in Oregon. In Colorado, the Cameron Peak Fire was the largest in state history, burning more than 208,000 acres. The state’s second-largest in history, the Pine Gulch Fire, also occurred in 2020.

David Romps, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, told James Temple of MIT Technology Review that we are living in a fundamentally climate-altered world. “To cut to the chase,” Romps said: “Were the heat wave and the lightning strikes and the dryness of the vegetation affected by global warming? Absolutely yes. Were they made significantly hotter, more numerous, and drier because of global warming? Yes, likely yes, and yes.”

Since 1980, when NOAA began tracking billion-dollar disasters, every state has had at least one. Texas leads the pack, with a stunning 124.

We can expect things to get even worse. The Biden administration and Congress need to take action immediately, and one of the steps they should take is to put an honest price on carbon emissions. Please urge your representatives on Capitol Hill to support such efforts.

BIDEN URGED TO SET UP NATIONAL CLIMATE COUNCIL

For those of us convinced that the United States must take immediate and strong actions to counter climate change, help is on the way. President-elect Joe Biden has nominated a number of leaders with climate expertise, and the selections indicate that he wants to take a whole-of-government approach to this central challenge.

Biden appears to have taken cues from a 300-page blueprint laying out a holistic approach to the climate. Drawn up by the Climate 21 Project, it took a year and a half to develop, and its recommendations, The Washington Post reported, include creating a White House National Climate Council that is “co-equal” to the Domestic Policy Council and National Economic Council.

Creating a well-structured National Climate Council (NCC), the report maintained, “would publicly elevate climate change as an issue of sustained national importance in the next Administration and beyond. Establishing an NCC would also make it unequivocally clear to the Cabinet, the Congress, business leaders, activists, and the general public who within the White House is principally responsible for organizing and executing on climate change policy.”

As envisioned by the Climate 21 Project, an assistant to the president for climate change would direct the NCC, while a deputy would be principally responsible for mitigation policy. In addition there would be three special assistants overseeing: 1) international policy; 2) policies related to the clean energy transition, the energy workforce, and tax and financial-sector issues; and 3) coordination with the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). 

One of our co-founders, former Idaho Congressman Walt Minnick (D), endorses such an approach. Back in 1971, he served as staff director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, established by President Richard Nixon to tackle the emerging global crisis involving heroin and other illicit drugs. The committee formulated new federal policies designed to curtail the flow of these drugs into the United States, creating the Drug Enforcement Administration and new federal drug treatment agencies. Its members included appropriate Cabinet members, agency heads and senior White House staff. “The problem was so serious and so broad,” said Minnick, “that you needed to directly engage the president and enlist the heads of a broad range of federal departments and agencies to solve it. A like approach and priority is essential to deal with a challenge as enormous as climate change.”

The most striking aspect of Biden’s approach is his determination to incorporate climate in his economic policies. “Climate change is going to touch every part of our economy, and climate change policy is going to require us to change the way we power and fuel every part of our economy,” said Joseph E. Aldy, a Harvard University economist who served as special assistant to President Barack Obama on energy and environment.

Officials at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged Biden and Congress to include clean energy components in an infrastructure package in a news briefing earlier this year. “That could be a big piece in the stimulus negotiations,” said Tim Profeta, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a co-author of the Climate 21 Project’s blueprint.

“Our economic understanding of climate action has evolved over the past decade,” Andrew Steer, president of World Resources Institute, wrote in a Fortune magazine op-ed. “We have strong evidence that climate policies promote strong and equitable economic growth. Smart action on climate change will increase economic efficiency, drive innovation and new technologies, and reduce investment risks. This is why Biden said on the campaign trail that when he thinks of climate change, he sees jobs. And it’s why many labor unions and manufacturers have gotten behind Biden’s proposed climate plans.” 

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomber is also advocating a whole-of-government approach. He recently published an op-ed arguing that some of the most important steps the new administration could take “have nothing to do with the Environmental Protection Agency” and involve measures like incorporating climate impacts into the Housing and Urban Development’s building standards and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s disclosure requirements. 

The Department of Agriculture is yet another agency that can play a major role in climate, in part because it oversees the 193 million-acre National Forest System. "The agriculture sector accounts for about 10% of current overall U.S. emissions, while U.S forests sequester the equivalent of about 15% of carbon dioxide emissions from combustion of U.S. fossil fuels annually," according to the Climate 21 Project. 

Biden sent an immediate signal that he is ambitious about tackling climate when he named former Secretary of State John Kerry as the nation’s international climate czar. “Climate change is the national security, public health, environmental, and moral issue of our time, and there is no one better suited to coordinate a bold international response to this crisis than John Kerry,” said Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). 

Biden said that Kerry “will be matched with a high-level White House climate policy coordinator and policymaking structure...that will lead efforts here in the United States to combat the climate crisis and mobilize action to meet the existential threat that we face.”

We continue to believe, as do most leading economists, that a price on carbon is the most efficient and quickest way to make progress on the climate front. We will be carrying that message to Capitol Hill and the new administration.