SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE ON CARBON PRICING: THERE’S NO OTHER PATH TO CLIMATE SAFETY

In a wide-ranging discussion at Harvard Climate Action Week, the Democrat from Rhode Island discussed the economic and environmental realities of climate taxation.

By The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, June 11, 2024

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did not mince words in a panel discussion held on Monday as part of Harvard Climate Action Week: “If we want a path to climate safety, it’s going to require us to do what is economically and morally right, which is to price carbon pollution.”

In a discussion with economists Catherine Wolfram and James Stock, Whitehouse, the Democratic Senator from Rhode Island and Co-Chair of the U.S. Senate Climate Task Force, dove into the fiscal realities and political challenges of passing carbon pricing legislation—an issue the Senator has long championed as being key to safeguarding against the worst effects of climate change.

Held in Sanders Theater, the panel, hosted by the Climate Action Accelerator at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, focused largely on how different carbon pricing mechanisms work, the building global movement to implement these programs, and what a realistic domestic carbon pricing system might look like.

“One of the big takeaways is that whatever decision it is that we happen to make around the planet next year, including doing nothing, it’s going to be quite consequential,” said James Stock, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University and Director of the Salata Institute.

Carbon pricing aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making pollution more expensive to put into the atmosphere. These programs come in two basic varieties—carbon taxes, which place a cost on the amount of emissions produced, allowing polluters to release as much emissions as they are willing to pay for, and emissions trading schemes, also called cap-and-trade programs, which set a limit on the total amount of emissions and require polluters to obtain permits or allowances that grant them the right them to release a certain amount of pollutants.

Carbon pricing programs are already in effect across much of Europe and in parts of South and Central America, Africa, Asia, and Canada, but the specifics, including tax rates and inflation schedules, scope, and revenue allocation, of these programs vary between countries.

The United States currently does not have a federal carbon pricing program, but that may change, panelists noted, due to a confluence of factors, including accelerating climate impacts, U.S. net zero targets, and motivation to address the federal deficit. Global economic pressures play a role, too, noted panelists, as an increasing number of countries tax imported goods based on the amount of pollution that’s required to make them. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)—a tariff that will predominantly impact imported goods from the cement, electricity, fertilizer, some metals, and hydrogen sectors from countries outside the EU—will take effect in 2026.

Catherine Wolfram, Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury, said a key aspect of CBAM is that it offers credits to countries that have carbon pricing programs, incentivizing these pricing initiatives worldwide.

“If the U.S. manages to implement a carbon price, the CBAM momentum will be even more powerful. The U.S. is such a big consumer in the world economy, it will really turbocharge this momentum,” said Wolfram. “If the U.S. doesn’t have a carbon price, the momentum is still going to be there, the U.S. just isn’t going to be participating in it. There will be decisions made and technical details that U.S. companies won’t be able to participate in. I see that as a real drawback.”

A significant portion of the discussion drew from an NBER working paper authored by Wolfram, Stock, alongside John Bistline, Kimberly A. Clausing, and Neil Mehrotra. The paper outlined several tax-based climate policy scenarios that could happen in the U.S. in 2025 and evaluated each scenario’s impact on the domestic economy, emissions reductions, and climate policy adoption abroad. The authors found that scenarios that extend current policies and include a carbon fee would lower emissions the most—up to about 66% by 2035—and would achieve the 2030 emissions reduction goal.

“The economic logic behind product pricing is so potent and so persuasive, I think that the U.S. will come to this realization,” Wolfram said.

Senator Whitehouse agreed but also pointed to obstacles that hinder carbon pricing legislation. Several bills proposing a federal carbon tax have been floated and failed in recent years, but, Whitehouse said, a new wave of them holds some promise.

In December of 2023, Whitehouse and Suzan K. DelBene, the Democrat representing Washington State’s first district, reintroduced the Clean Competition Act, which proposes a border adjustment on imported goods from carbon-intensive industries, including petroleum and fossil fuels, fertilizers, metals, paper, and petrochemicals, with exemptions for lower-income countries. Most revenue would fund grants to help affected industries invest in decarbonization technologies.

Separate legislation sponsored by Republican Senators Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) also proposes a border adjustment, though specifics of the bill differ. A bipartisan Senate proposal from Democrat Chris Coons (Delaware) and Republican Kevin Cramer (North Dakota) would require the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct a study comparing emissions from certain goods produced domestically to those produced abroad. Whitehouse commended his Republican colleagues for their work.

“I give [Cassidy and Graham] a lot of credit for what they’ve done,” he said. “Obviously, there’s a lot of fossil fuel blowback against them, but they’ve stuck to their guns so good on them.”

Whitehouse added that while bipartisan negotiations on carbon pricing are positive developments and the American public is widely supportive of placing the cost of pollution on polluters themselves, “we have to fight through enormous fossil fuel intervention,” including billions in dark money, in order to enact effective climate reform and enforce it.

The panelists pointed out that there is precedent for a pollution tax in the U.S. Legislation passed in 2022 and originally proposed by Whitehouse places a fee on methane emissions for companies that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon pollution annually. Whether the U.S. will adopt meaningful carbon pricing legislation depends on whether politicians can understand that “there are now no remaining known scenarios for a pathway to climate safety that don’t include carbon pricing,” Whitehouse said. “…There can be no more quarrel on that.”

https://salatainstitute.harvard.edu/senator-sheldon-whitehouse-on-carbon-pricing-theres-no-other-path-to-climate-safety/

Oil and Gas Companies Are Trying to Rig the Marketplace

Op-ed by Andrew Dessler, The New York Times, June 1, 2024

Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University.

Many of us focused on the problem of climate change have been waiting for the day when renewable energy would become cheaper than fossil fuels.

Well, we’re there: Solar and wind power are less expensive than oil, gas and coal in many places and are saving our economy billions of dollars. These and other renewable energy sources produced 30 percent of the world’s electricity in 2023, which may also have been the year that greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector peaked. In the United States alone, the amount of solar and wind energy capacity waiting to be built and connected to the grid is 18 times the amount of natural gas power capacity in the queue.

So you might reasonably conclude that the market is pivoting, and the end for fossil fuels is near.

But it’s not. Instead, fossil fuel interests — including think tanks, trade associations and dark money groups — are often preventing the market from shifting to the lowest cost energy.

Similar to other industries from tobacco to banking to pharmaceuticals, oil and gas interests use tactics like lobbying and manufacturing “grass-roots” support to maximize profits. They also spread misinformation: It’s well documented that fossil fuel interests tried to convince the public that their products didn’t cause climate change, in the same way that Big Tobacco tried to convince the public that its products didn’t harm people’s health.

But as renewables have become a more formidable competitor, we are now seeing something different: a large-scale effort to deceive the public into thinking that the alternative products are harmful, unreliable and worse for consumers. And as renewables continue to drop in cost, it will become even more critical for policymakers and others to challenge these attempts to slow the adoption of cheaper and healthier forms of energy.

One technique the industry and its allies have used is to spread falsehoods — for example, that offshore wind turbines kill whales or that renewable energy is prohibitively expensive — to stop projects from getting built. What appear to be ordinary concerned citizens or groups making good-faith arguments about renewable energy are actually a well-funded effort to disseminate a lie. Researchers at Brown University have revealed a complex web of fossil fuel interests, climate-denial think tanks and community groups that are behind opposition to wind farms off New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Fossil fuel interests also donate piles of money to sympathetic politicians who then make false claims about renewable energy and push oil and gas on their constituents even when renewable energy is cheaper. After the Texas blackout in 2021, which was caused in part by the failure of the natural gas system, politicians blamed renewable energy, and have since argued that more natural gas is needed to strengthen the state electrical grid.

The Texas grid could certainly be made more robust. But building backup natural gas plants that should ultimately sit idle 90 percent of the time is probably the most expensive way to address the problem, compared with approaches like paying consumers to cut their energy use when the electrical grid nears its limits.

One of the most pervasive pieces of misinformation being spread by fossil fuel interests is that we cannot run our society on renewable energy. It is true that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. However, we could deal with this by expanding our existing electrical grid to allow us to move clean energy from regions with excess to those with shortfalls. When that’s not sufficient, power sources that can be quickly turned on and off, like batteries or hydroelectricity, can match supply and demand. In the current U.S. grid, natural gas provides the primary balance for intermittent wind and solar, and we can keep using it that way — in very limited quantities — when we need it. One study published in 2020 showed that we could operate a grid that is 90 percent clean energy and 10 percent natural gas by 2035, which would produce energy for a cost similar to that of a grid with a continuation of current policies.

Alarmingly, fossil fuel interests are also looking to dictate how schoolchildren learn about the environment. Children are some of the most powerful messengers when it comes to climate awareness, so fossil fuel promoters are keen to shape their understanding from the start. They have succeeded in getting the Texas State Board of Education to reject textbooks that accurately depict the effects of climate change and extreme weather.

Fossil fuels do deserve credit for getting us to where America is today — rich beyond the dreams of anyone living before the Industrial Revolution. But oil and gas are not the fuels of the future; they are changing the climate and generating air pollution that kills millions of people each year. They also bolster autocratic petrostates, fuel conflicts over energy resources and contribute to geopolitical instability. Simply put, the industry’s lies can cost consumers their health, their money and their security.

With existing technologies, the United States can largely phase out oil, gas and coal. The last 5 percent to 10 percent of that process may be expensive, but credible estimates place the cost of getting to net-zero emissions within the historical range of energy costs. This means that a sustainable future hinges on politics, not technology or science.

Policymakers must now call out the fact that an industry facing obsolescence is distorting the market to try to shut out a superior competitor, clean energy. Make no mistake: Failure to do so may mean a planet no longer able to sustain human life in the style to which we have become accustomed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/opinion/clean-energy-solar-wind.html?searchResultPosition=1

Canada’s fire season erupts, sending harmful smoke into United States

Air quality alerts are in effect in Minnesota and Wisconsin — an unwelcome reminder of last summer, when Canadian wildfire smoke spread south.

By Ian Livingston, The Washington Post, May 13, 2024

Wildfires in Canada have roared back to life, sending harmful smoke into the northern United States — an unwelcome reminder of last summer’s historic fire season that also repeatedly sent plumes of noxious haze southward.

Almost a year to the date from the explosive start to the 2023 fire season, hundreds of fires have erupted in Canada, including a dozen major and out-of-control blazes. At least 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of land have burned so far, much of it in recent days.

Smoke from the blazes has led to air quality alerts for much of Alberta and its surrounding provinces, as well as Minnesota and Wisconsin. Edmonton was subjected to red-tinged skies and hazardous air quality over the weekend because of wildfires to its north.

International Falls, Minn., awoke Monday to air quality alerts, which expanded to cover a large portion of Minnesota and Wisconsin, including Minneapolis and Green Bay.

Wildfires roar to life

Even during winter, numerous blazes in Canada — known as “zombie fires” — smoldered beneath the snow. The combination of a warm and very dry winter set the stage for flames to quickly expand this spring.

Belts of extreme to exceptional drought are draped across the zone from central British Columbia to northern Alberta, where many of the worst fires rage. The majority of provincial land from Canada’s west coast to Ontario is experiencing at least moderate drought.

More than 100 fires were burning in British Columbia on Monday morning, and just shy of four dozen in Alberta. Other large blazes were scorching provinces to the east.

The largest uncontrolled fire was burning in the mining region of Manitoba near the border with Saskatchewan, about 400 miles north of the North Dakota border. It had grown to at least 86,000 acres (35,000 hectares) by early Sunday since igniting three days earlier. The fire led to evacuations in the town of Flin Flon and power cuts across the region.

Farther west, a blaze near Fort McMurray in Alberta’s wooded north was also out of control. The fire, about 225 miles from Edmonton, more than tripled in size from over the weekend, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. An evacuation alert was in effect there for residents to be prepared to leave if necessary.

In adjacent eastern British Columbia, another out-of-control fire was threatening Fort Nelson in the Canadian Rockies about 650 miles north of Vancouver. Some residents of that area have also been urged to evacuate.

Smoky skies return downwind into United States

The worst of the smoke from these fires has been near the source in southwestern Canada. The air quality reached Code Purple — the most hazardous level — over the weekend in an area along the British Columbia-Alberta border region, according to the U.S. government’s AirNow pollution monitoring website.

Parts of northwest Minnesota saw air quality decline to Code Red on Sunday, signifying unhealthy levels of smoke pollution; this area even briefly experienced Code Purple conditions. Much of the northern Plains and the Upper Midwest, as well as adjacent Canadian prairies, have experienced at least Code Red levels.

Smaller quantities of smoke riding along the high-altitude winds of the jet stream even reached the East Coast of the United States over the weekend.

Over the next two to three days, hazy skies and the acrid smell of smoke should continue to spread across portions of Canada, the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes. The smoke may sink southward into the eastern Plains and the Midwest at times on Tuesday.

Fires in Mexico also send smoke into the United States

It’s not just Canada that is sending smoke into the United States. Mexico is also contributing to hazy conditions because of rapidly spreading fires fueled by excessive heat and drought.

A large plume of smoke from Mexico is poised to spread over far-southern Texas, the southern Gulf states and Florida in the days to come.

Like Canada, large parts of Mexico are covered by the two most extreme levels of drought. Its drought has intensified extraordinary and persistent heat, as high as 123 degrees Fahrenheit (51 Celsius) in recent days — the hottest ever observed in May in the Northern Hemisphere, according to weather historian Maximiliano Herrera.

Human-caused climate change intensifies heat, droughts and fire intensity.

What’s next?

Unusually warm and dry conditions are predicted in British Columbia and Alberta into June, leading officials to warn of an elevated fire risk. A developing La Niña climate pattern may eventually offer more consistent rains late summer or fall reducing the threat somewhat.

More broadly, human-caused climate change will continue to elevate the fire risk in Canada because temperatures are climbing so fast in the region. The warming dries out the land surface and makes it more combustible.

Jason Samenow contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/05/13/canadian-wildfire-smoke-minnesota-wisconsin/

Here’s how EVs could get 200 miles per gallon

A new report says that electric vehicles could double in efficiency in the next decades — if automakers make the right moves

By Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, April 10, 2024

When the Toyota Prius cruised into North America for the first time in the early aughts, drivers were shocked. At a time when the average sedan got just 23 miles per gallon (and the average passenger car just 20 miles per gallon), the Prius got 48. Thanks to regenerative braking and the little electric motor, its city mileage was better than its highway mileage.

That was then. Now, when it comes to miles per gallon, electric vehicles blow hybrid cars out of the water. The average electric car in the United States gets the equivalent of 106 miles per gallon. And, according to a new report, that number could more than double in the next decades, to the equivalent of more than 200 miles per gallon.

That growth in efficiency — possible with existing technologies — could help ease the strain that electric vehicles are expected to place on the grid, extend battery range and even limit the need for public car charging. With a concerted push, the U.S. transition to EVs could be made smoother and billions of dollars cheaper for consumers, experts argue.

Without it, the country could face increased electricity demand equivalent to about a quarter of all current U.S. electric power use.

“It’s like walking by money on the sidewalk,” said Luke Tonachel, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the authors of the report released Wednesday by NRDC and the Electric Power Research Institute. “We’ll miss out on savings that are right there in front of us.”

The groups’ analysis finds that increasing the efficiency of EVs could cut energy consumption per mile in half by 2050 — and in so doing, reduce pressure on the grid by about half.

For decades, vehicles have been getting more efficient. In 1975, when fuel economy standards were first introduced in the United States, the average car or truck in the country got just 13 miles per gallon and belched pollutants that wafted into the atmosphere and people’s lungs. Now, the average car, truck or SUV gets around 27 miles per gallon — although the popularity of larger SUVs has slowed progress.

EVs change the calculus. Electric cars start with a huge advantage: They don’t create waste heat. In a gas car, only 16 to 25 percent of the fuel energy actually goes into the wheels — the rest is lost mostly in the form of heat and friction. In an electric car, on the other hand, 87 to 91 percent of the energy in the battery goes to power its wheels.

That’s why electric cars start with staggeringly high miles “per gallon,” in some cases over 100 miles per gallon equivalent. (Miles per gallon equivalent is a metric defined by the Environmental Protection Agency; a gallon of gas has about 115,000 BTUs of energy, or about 33.7 kilowatt-hours.)

Sandy Munro, an automotive engineer and the founder of the consulting firm Munro and Associates, says that EVs have the potential to make greater efficiency gains, but internal combustion engines do not. “We’ve wrung out the ICE vehicle as far as it can go,” he said.

Munro helped develop the gasoline Vulcan V6 engine, which, he says, dramatically lowered engine costs — but the engine is now basically obsolete.

“Now, it’s a boat anchor,” he said. “If I had one, I’d just throw it overboard.”

But even among EVs, there can be big variability in efficiency. While drivers of electric cars are more focused on range and the distance between charging stations, efficiency matters as well. The Ford F-150 Lightning, for example, gets just 70 miles per gallon equivalent, while Tesla Model 3 can get up to 142 MPGe. Even within cars of around the same weight and size, some EVs can be much more efficient than others.

In the new report, researchers found that a combination of increasing battery density, reducing tire rolling resistance, and cutting the weight of vehicles through high-strength steel or carbon fiber could double efficiency by 2050. As a guide, the study authors looked at the Mercedes EQXX, a concept car that recently drove the 627 miles from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Dubai on a single charge.

The study modeled those improvements for passenger cars, SUVs and pickup trucks. The result, they projected, could be vehicles that got the equivalent of 277 miles per gallon by 2050, or more than 8 miles per kilowatt-hour. If those efficiency leaps happen, they could save $200 billion annually in electricity costs by 2050 and save more than 1,000 terawatt-hours in electricity demand, the researchers projected.

“If we want electric vehicles to succeed, if we can reduce the burden on the grid — that would be hugely beneficial,” said Marc Wiseman, the founder of Oberon Insights and a report co-author.

The question is whether automakers are planning to move toward that greater efficiency. Although the EPA requires EVs to have the same fuel economy stickers as gas-powered cars, experts say neither consumers nor automakers are looking closely at the efficiency of electric cars right now.

Frank Menchaca, president of SAE Sustainable Mobility Solutions, said that the shift to more efficient cars will depend on how quickly automakers can change their manufacturing to electric cars and secure supply chains, and how fast consumers adopt the vehicles. Automakers need to know that the transition is progressing, he said, to push for advanced efficiency.

But, he said, automakers will be motivated. “The more efficient the vehicle is, the more of a selling point it is,” Menchaca said.

Ultimately, some analysts say the United States may need to create specific fuel economy standards for electric vehicles. Now, fuel economy standards are largely targeted toward gas-powered cars — EVs help any company raise the average miles per gallon of its fleet.

“That’s a relic of a market dominated by gas vehicles,” Tonachel said. “But in the future, EVs will be the main market, and standards need to keep up with that reality.”

The EPA recently released new standards for emissions from tailpipes; the Transportation Department is expected to set new fuel economy standards in the next few months.

EV owners might not have as much motivation to push for greater efficiency because switching from gas already lowers their fuel costs so dramatically. But better efficiency could also mean Americans won’t need as many public chargers — one of the largest hurdles to U.S. adoption of electric transportation.

“The efficiency thing is a bit of a surprise — people think, ‘Oh we’re done,’ when you move to electric vehicles,” Wiseman said. “But you forget that there’s all these other benefits.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/04/10/ev-efficiency-double-2050/

A Carbon Tax Is Back on the Table

The Trump tax cuts expire in 2025, which means things are about the get wacky in Washington.

By Matthew Zeitlin, Heatmap News, March 4, 2024

Climate policy has been all over the place lately thanks to pressure from interest groups, pre-election jitters, and the plausibility of a re-elected President Donald Trump laying waste to existing climate policy.

But further in the future, beyond the ups and downs of electoral politics, there’s a policy cataclysm coming that, some hope, could create an opening for that long sought, always denied dream of climate policy: the carbon tax.

Let’s back up. There are two things happening that might free up this policy space, one domestic, and the other overseas. At the end of 2025, much of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, otherwise known as the Trump tax cuts, will expire, including several provisions that many in Congress will want to extend, including lower income tax rates, a higher standard deduction and personal exemption, and an expanded child tax credit.

At the same time, much of the revenue that helped pay for those tax cuts — such as limitations on deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes — will also expire.

Measures that reduce taxes tend to be popular and those that raise them tend not to be, and that’s as true with the Trump tax cuts as with anything. (Since basically the day the TCJA passed, there’s been intense bipartisan opposition to the limitation on deductions for state and local taxes, for example.) That they’re expiring all at the same time will create a policy free for all.

And just as the Trump tax cuts expire, the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will come into full effect in January 2026, complementing its existing cap-and-trade and carbon pricing system. Essentially, CBAM is a tariff on imports from countries that don’t price carbon the same way the EU does, and it’s designed to prevent what’s known as “leakage,” where producers in countries with a carbon price simply offshore emissions-intensive production to countries that don’t. (It also helps make sure those products from other countries aren’t able to undercut domestic producers on price, a facet of the policy some have pooh-poohed as protectionist.)

Starting last year, EU trading partners had to begin reporting the carbon content of some emissions-intensive exports in preparations for payments starting in 2026. One of those trading partners is the United States, which exports some $351 billion worth of goods to the EU, second only to Canada.

Bills that would just address the carbon price gap have been proposed several times in the current Congress, including by climate stalwart and Democrat from Rhode Island, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, plus some Republicans who think America should get an advantage over China for having a less carbon-intensive manufacturing sector.

This all creates a kind of celestial alignment in favor of a policy that has been rejected so many times (RIP the 2009 cap-and-trade bill and Bill Clinton’s BTU Tax) — or at least that’s what its advocates hope. Based on the history of carbon taxation and related polices, you might be pessimistic. But we haven’t seen a year like 2025.

“If you think about carbon price relative to raising people’s income taxes, when you put it in the whole fiscal conversation that’s going to happen in 2025, it’s going to look more attractive,” Catherine Wolfram, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and former Treasury official in the Biden administration, told me. Wolfram was also one of the authors of a paper released last week by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project mapping out how various climate policies could emerge from the witch’s brew of TCJA expiring and carbon tariffs would actually effect U.S. emissions.

The paper concluded that of the seven 2025 climate policy options they considered — including doing nothing to the IRA and enacting planned new emissions rules, doing nothing to the IRA with no new emissions rules, repealing the IRA, expanding the IRA tax credits for clean electricity, instituting a carbon fee starting at $15 a ton, instituting a clean electricity standard that would mandate a certain portion of electricity be produced from non-carbon-emitting sources with fees for noncompliance, and a carbon fee along with repealing some parts of the IRA — the carbon fee and the clean electricity standard would bring emissions down by the most, just missing the stated 2030 target.

And that’s just U.S. emissions. Wolfram said that if the U.S. were to institute a carbon fee, it would be a major step towards a worldwide carbon price, as countries would want to avoid paying fees to both the U.S. and Europe for pollution-intensive exports. “The more countries that get in this game,” Wolfram said, “the more powerful that policy can be.”

Whitehouse spoke at a Brookings event last week, saying, “We’ll find out a lot when people start getting tariffed through the European Union CBAM,” and that even Republicans were “pricing curious” due to the specter of carbon tariffs. “The forces are converging on making that work,” he added about the idea of finally getting a carbon price of our own.

Wolfram is also — cautiously — optimistic. “We haven’t tried since 2009. That’s 15 years ago,” she said. “The climate continues to change, and it’s changed pretty dramatically in the last 15 years. I don’t think we should have too many conclusions about what’s possible.”

https://heatmap.news/economy/carbon-tax-2025?_hsenc=p2ANqtz--Cd6pPOSdnwwnQVPMo5x8-K6hQpXijFYZ8tYtR2Orb0QMXIW7Bac3gfHCn3ktbVBsrjcrrCQgWiPM3RwRMPOdhqP9yN1luNsjUO2Tb2PSOBBBtJBw&campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20240305&instance_id=116801&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=159908&te=1&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b&utm_campaign=Hot+News&utm_content=296871532&utm_medium=email&utm_source=hs_email#

Will America ever stop building more highways?

As emissions rise, some environmentalists are turning their attention to widening roads as well as pipelines

By Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, Feb. 15, 2024

For decades, the United States has built and expanded a 220,000-mile network of state and interstate highways, easing cross-country travel while dividing cities and boosting suburban sprawl.

But as the planet warms, some activists are fighting back — citing the future emissions of adding lanes and the devastation faced by communities razed to make way for them. Their push against giant multilane highways represents an emerging frontier for the environmental movement, which has historically been more focused on fossil fuel projects than seven-lane roads.

“We don’t often think of it in those terms, but expanding highways is essentially like building new oil pipelines,” said Ben Crowther, the policy director for America Walks. “It increases emissions in the same way.”

Last week, a coalition of almost 200 groups called for a nationwide moratorium on expanding highways — citing their environmental harm and the forced relocation of nearby low-income communities of color. A new national group called the Freeway Fighters is uniting local ones under one umbrella, helping activists learn from each other on how to slow expansion — from an almost $10 billion project to widen Interstate 45 around downtown Houston to a plan to enlarge Interstate 5 around Portland, Ore.

It might seem to be an improbable fight for a country long known for its “love affair” with the car. But with the United States aiming to cut emissions to zero by 2050 — and less than 1 percent of cars on the road electric — activists say America’s main transportation system has to change.

Historically, much of America’s public money spent on transportation has gone to highways. In 2017, $177 billion in public money went to highways, according to the Congressional Budget Office, more than double the $75 billion spent on mass transit and rail infrastructure. Even now, with many of the nation’s highways in disrepair, about 20 to 30 percent of all public highway spending goes to expansion, rather than programs to fix and repair existing roads.

State and local transportation officials say highway expansions can help relieve traffic jams, improve road safety and boost economic development. If planned correctly, they also argue that such projects can boost bus movement and ride-sharing.

Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said in a statement that each state transportation department “uses a wide variety of strategies to advance safety, mobility, and access across the state and in every community.”

But experts argue that expansion projects do little to reduce traffic congestion — and add to the country’s climate problems. Almost 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from transportation — most of it from cars and trucks. While interstate highways make up only around 1 percent of the nation’s roads, they carry around a quarter of its traffic.

“We continue to spend significant amounts of money at the federal level and at the state level expanding our highway networks,” said Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst with Frontier Group. “Given the climate issues that we are already facing — and the fact that we are already building out a massive highway network around the country — I think it’s legitimate to ask whether that’s the right set of priorities.”

One of the arguments against such expansions is the theory that adding more lanes just leads to more traffic — what economists call “induced demand.” Sitting in traffic on a highway during rush hour may seem like an advertisement for expanding the highway — after all, more lanes allow a greater flow of traffic. Under that logic, traffic operates a bit like water through a pipe: The larger the pipe, the more water can get through.

But economists and traffic engineers say that’s not a good analogy. When lanes are added to a highway — or any road, for that matter — more cars arrive to fill the available space. People might decide to drive more, or the expansion might further develop an area and encourage people to move in.

“Induced demand is just what happens when you increase supply,” said Matthew Turner, a professor of economics at Brown University. In 2009, Turner and his colleague Gilles Duranton published a paper showing that vehicle miles traveled in U.S. cities increased “in exact proportion” to highways. The result has since been replicated in Japan, China and many countries around the world, including in Europe. “It looks like this is a fact about the world,” Turner said.

Turner says that this doesn’t mean building a highway is always the wrong choice — but that building a highway to reduce congestion is not effective. “If you are trying to build to reduce road congestion, you should stop,” he said. “If you are trying to add road congestion to facilitate people moving around, that’s a whole different thing.”

But anti-highway activists say this link between bigger roads and more highway traffic — combined with the heavy pollution burden on communities — should take expansions off the table.

Some environmentalists also say they feel betrayed that the Biden administration is not spending all of the approximately $350 billion in highway funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on repairing existing highways.

According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, more than 20 percent of the funding, which is spread out over five years, so far has gone to expanding or widening roads. An additional 6 percent has funded new construction. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, 17 of the 20 largest highway projects supported by the infrastructure law include expansions.

“This money could have been used to change the status quo,” Crowther of America Walks said. “Instead, we’ve seen a doubling down on new highway projects.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration has taken the strongest actions of any Administration in history to reduce carbon pollution in transportation,” Samantha Keitt, a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration, said in an email. She pointed to funding in the infrastructure law for electric buses, public transit, EV charging stations, and bicycle and pedestrian projects.

President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act also included money to tear down highways that divided communities. But that program only has $1 billion in dedicated funds — a tiny sliver of the tens of billions of dollars going to expanding existing highways. The infrastructure law also included approximately $3 billion in a program that could remove roads dividing neighborhoods.

The Biden administration has encouraged the adoption of electric cars as a path to meeting climate goals. But it will be difficult to deploy EVs fast enough to completely remove emissions from transportation. According to one study in the journal Nature Climate Change, 90 percent of vehicles would need to be electric by 2050 to meet climate goals. And even if EV adoption accelerates dramatically, many gas-powered cars will still be on the road by mid-century.

Beyond the climate impact, activists argue that highways displace communities of color and expose neighborhoods to deadly air pollution. According to one analysis of data from the National Air Toxics Assessment, the risk of respiratory illness is 3.4 times higher for people living less than one mile from a highway than for those living more than 10 miles away.

“We’re thinking about air quality and what it does to people’s bodies,” said Ally Smither, a singer and an organizer for Stop TxDOT I-45, a group opposing the Houston highway expansion.

Coalitions resisting highway expansions can include a range of different groups — community efforts, environmental groups and other civic organizations. In the push to stop the widening of I-45, neighborhood groups are joined by public health advocates, bike organizations and the local chapter of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

Kendra London, a Houston activist and the founder of Our Afrikan Family, learned about the expansion project four years ago. Since then, she has hosted community meetings and scheduled bike tours to show the houses and residents who will be displaced if the project, which is estimated to demolish over 1,000 homes, goes through. “We’re left out of too many vital conversations,” London said.

Activists have rallied hundreds of highway opponents at public meetings and protested outside of state transportation offices. Other groups file civil rights lawsuits or complaints under the National Environmental Policy Act, which triggers stringent reviews for many major projects.

“Turn out as many people as you possibly can and put up a show of force,” Crowther said.

Some states are challenging the status quo outright. The Colorado Department of Transportation has set strict emissions targets in response to a 2019 law. The new rules require the state to analyze how highway expansions would increase emissions — including induced demand — and offset those increases with transit, bike or pedestrian projects elsewhere.

Matt Frommer, a senior transportation associate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said the rules had helped block an expansion of Interstate 25 after the state realized that the project would exceed new pollution limits.

The state plans to spend some of the hundreds of millions of dollars saved on bus and transit projects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/02/15/will-america-ever-stop-building-more-highways/