“There’s one policy the US can pass today that can also save lives: stopping utility shutoffs in the summertime because a customer has missed one or more payments.
Right now, only 18 states have any protections that prevent utilities from shutting off a customer’s power in a heat wave because of missed payments, while 41 states have these protections for the cold. That leaves most of the population vulnerable to utility shutoffs during the deadliest extreme weather window of the year.”
“Fallout from the Supreme Court’s attack on federal climate regulations is spreading throughout the executive branch, creating legal uncertainty for rules on topics as far afield as abortion, immigration and even amateur auto racing.
Opponents of federal actions on pipelines, asbestos, nuclear waste, corporate disclosures and highway planning are also seizing on the logic of the court’s June 30 decision, which imposed sharp limits on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.”
…
“In their decision, the high court’s six conservative justices invoked what they called the “major questions” doctrine to declare that agencies such as EPA need explicit congressional approval before “asserting highly consequential power” over almost any policy area. But they did not offer a precise definition of what would cause a regulation to qualify as major — a question that agencies and lower courts may now need to spend years wrestling with.”
…
““If anything’s ambiguous at all, you get people challenging on major questions grounds, and you have to go find out if Congress gave you an extra clear statement,” said Nathan Richardson, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. He called it a reversal of the long-standing tradition of courts deferring to agencies’ policy expertise. “It’s not deference, it’s anti-deference.””
“The initiative would connect participants in a federal program that subsidizes energy costs for low-income residents with developers of community solar projects, which sell subscriptions to households for renewable power with the promise of lowering their monthly electricity bills.
The Biden administration has big aspirations for the program, projecting it could spur the development of 134 gigawatts of new solar power capacity nationwide, the agency official said. To put that in perspective, total U.S. solar capacity today sits at 97.2 gigawatts, according to the Energy Department.
And it could lead to sizable savings, too: DOE estimated participants in the five initial pilot project states and the District of Columbia alone would save more than $1 billion on their energy bills annually.”
“To avoid the chances of catastrophic climate change while ensuring the world can continue to grow — especially for poor people who live in chronically energy-starved areas — we’ll need to produce ever more energy from sources that emit little or no greenhouse gases.”
…
“Zero-carbon sources of renewable energy like wind and solar have seen tremendous increases in capacity and equally impressive decreases in price in recent years, while the decades-old technology of hydropower is still what the International Energy Agency calls the “forgotten giant of low-carbon electricity.”
And then there’s nuclear power. Viewed strictly through the lens of climate change, nuclear power can claim to be a green dream.
Unlike coal or natural gas, nuclear plants do not produce direct carbon dioxide emissions when they generate electricity, and over the past 50 years they’ve reduced CO2 emissions by nearly 60 gigatonnes. Unlike solar or wind, nuclear plants aren’t intermittent, and they require significantly less land area per megawatt produced. Unlike hydropower — which has reached its natural limits in many developed countries, including the US — nuclear plants don’t require environmentally intensive dams.
As accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown, when nuclear power goes wrong, it can go really wrong. But newer plant designs reduce the risk of such catastrophes, which themselves tend to garner far more attention than the steady stream of deaths from climate change and air pollution linked to the normal operation of conventional power plants.”
…
“Germany, which views itself as a global leader on climate, is grasping at the most carbon-intensive fuel source in part because it made the decision in 2011 to fully turn its back on nuclear power, enshrining what had been a planned phase-out into law.”
“One especially dangerous aspect of the current heat wave is how warm it’s been after sunset. The UK just broke its record for the hottest temperature recorded at night. In many parts of the world, nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime heat. This often leads to worse health problems because people find little relief as heat stress mounts.”
…
“Much of Europe remains haunted by the 2003 heat wave that killed more than 70,000 people. The good news is that natural disasters like heat waves are becoming less deadly around the world. Better forecasting and more tools to cope with heat have saved lives in Europe. But with disrupted travel, increasing hospital visits, and lost productivity, heat is still extracting a growing social and economic toll.”
“Part of the problem is that many buildings, highways, and other infrastructure in Europe are old and built with outdated temperature extremes in mind, said Mikhail Chester, an associate professor of engineering at Arizona State University. They simply can’t tolerate the new normal, he said. Hence things like railway fires in London.
Cities like Dubai and Phoenix, Arizona, in contrast, can withstand higher temperature extremes because their infrastructure was built more recently and with heat in mind. While these places may face issues related to water and energy usage, 100-degree weather isn’t as big of a problem for them, Chester said.”
…
“Air conditioning is relatively rare in most of northern Europe, especially compared to the United States. The same is true of the London Tube — only 40 percent of the train network has air conditioning, and authorities warned commuters in the British capital to carry water with them if they traveled.”
“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled..in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that it “is a major questions case.” As such, the Court ruled 6–3 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not have clear authority from Congress to regulate the entire U.S. electric power production industry through exercising “unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language” in a rarely used section of the Clean Air Act. This decision will likely curtail future efforts by the Biden administration to significantly cut the emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel-burning power plants that contribute to man-made global warming.”
…
“So what is the major questions doctrine? “The Supreme Court has declared that if an agency seeks to decide an issue of major national significance, its action must be supported by clear statutory authorization,” explained the Congressional Research Service in a recent analysis. Certainly, the huge costs imposed by new regulations that are not clearly authorized by Congress would seem to qualify as an issue of national significance. In fact, in his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts notes, “EPA’s own modeling concluded that the rule would entail billions of dollars in compliance costs (to be paid in the form of higher energy prices), require the retirement of dozens of coal-fired plants, and eliminate tens of thousands of jobs across various sectors.””
…
“In her dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan counters by pointing out the Obama administration’s EPA calculated that by 2030 the annual public health and climate benefits of proposed regulations under its Clean Power Plan would be between $34 to $54 billion while the costs would amount to $8.4 billion. While electricity would cost more, consumers would save $7 monthly on their electric bills due to increased energy efficiency. A 2016 study in the journal PLOS One similarly found that the health co-benefits outweighed the costs incurred from reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Despite the fact that the benefits of costly and transformative regulations might outweigh their costs that still does not mean for the Court’s majority that their issuance is not a major question requiring clear direction from Congress before going forward.
“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,'” concludes Chief Justice Roberts. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in [the Clean Air Act]. A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.””
“Global known reserves of natural gas would last nearly 50 years at current rates of consumption. Burning natural gas to generate electricity emits about half of the carbon dioxide that coal does. This is why many environmental activist groups a little more than a decade ago hailed natural gas as “the bridge to the clean energy future.”
In fact, the mostly market-driven switch from coal to natural gas to generate electricity in the U.S. has served as a bridge to a cleaner energy future. The replacement in the U.S. of coal-fired power plants by those fueled by natural gas is responsible for a 32 percent reduction since 2005 in carbon dioxide emissions from that sector. Overall, annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have fallen by around 23 percent since 2005. Despite the undeniable role that the switch from coal to natural gas has played in significantly reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, many environmental activists now perplexingly denounce natural gas as a “bridge to nowhere.””
…
“What about nuclear power? The fact that splitting atoms to generate electricity produces no greenhouse gas emissions should be enough to establish nuclear power as a “climate-friendly” energy technology. Last week, the International Energy Agency released a report arguing that global nuclear power capacity needs to double from 413 gigawatts now to 812 gigawatts by 2050 in order to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets set in international agreements addressing the problem of man-made climate change. Meanwhile, in response to pressure from environmental activists, Germany is going in the opposite direction, shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants while firing up electricity generation fueled by coal.
The ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute has just released a new study setting out various scenarios of how the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S. could unfold over the next 30 years. In the optimistic scenario, U.S. nuclear power generation capacity would rise from 95 gigawatts from conventional nuclear plants today to as much as 470 gigawatts generated by advanced reactors in 2050. Expanding nuclear power production would both help smooth out the intermittency of wind and solar generation and further cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.”
“the decision means that agencies like the EPA can’t create regulations that have expansive social and economic impacts on their own, despite decades of precedent doing exactly that. Such rules would now require Congress to specifically create laws to implement them, and given the difficulty of passing any federal legislation, it would drastically impair the EPA’s ability to regulate the pollution that’s heating up the planet.”
…
“Many of these other cases are still underway, but depending on how they’re decided, they could further erode the government’s tools for addressing the most urgent environmental problems.”