“a bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes $350 billion to address long-ignored environmental threats. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is the largest sum in recent memory directed at cleaning up pollution, from replacing lead pipes to capping methane-spewing oil wells.
The funding could make a serious dent in air and water pollution for certain communities by preventing runoff from abandoned mines and cleaning up old, toxic manufacturing sites. People who live near busy roadways, airports, and ports may benefit from the boost to electric vehicle charging stations, school buses, and cranes that will replace gas- and diesel-burning cars and equipment.
Other investments will improve public health more indirectly: One of the law’s major provisions includes expanding transmission that can move more clean energy across the grid. By increasing the mix of renewables, states and the utilities they regulate ultimately would need to burn fewer fossil fuels to power the economy.
The biggest criticism of the new law is what it leaves out: Environmental advocates say the funding only meets a fraction of the nation’s needs for addressing water and air pollution, and falls far short of the transformative change Biden promised on the campaign trail.
This is also not the transformative climate bill that climate activists had hoped for.”
“The bill, H.R. 3684 (117), is historic in its scope with $550 billion in new money funneled into hard infrastructure, from overhauling bridges to supercharging Amtrak’s most popular rail corridor in the Northeast. But it falls far short of Biden’s original vision, which promised to dramatically reduce the climate impacts of transportation, the single largest source of pollution. In the end, the final product was the victim of the bipartisan focus it took to get the bill done and is an example of the razor thin governing majority Democrats must navigate.”
“If Congress fails to enshrine key climate policies as federal laws, Biden’s Plan B includes executive orders and major regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York Times reported.
The problem is that executive actions aren’t an ideal substitute for federal laws, and may last only as long as Biden’s presidency. EPA regulation also “tends to lag [behind] the technological realities,” meaning it may only modestly nudge the economy in a new direction, Jesse Jenkins, an environmental engineering professor at Princeton University, told Vox. It’s also vulnerable to intervention by the Supreme Court.”
“Under the Paris agreement, every country is required to publish a climate change target and a route for getting there, or what’s called a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). The first round of NDCs put forward in 2015 were clearly inadequate, putting the world on course for roughly 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century.
Climate leaders hoped that in the runup to COP26, countries would roll out new commitments for the coming decade, as well as long-term strategies for eliminating emissions by the middle of the century. As of October 21, 114 countries and the European Union have submitted new NDCs. Some major emitters like the US, United Kingdom, and China have proposed or submitted stronger targets. But others, like Russia, Brazil, and Australia, did not meaningfully ramp up their goals. Still others like India have yet to submit a new NDC.
The leaders at COP26 will try to create carrots and sticks to motivate the laggards and holdouts to take more aggressive action. Many countries are now adamant that the limit for warming this century should be 1.5°C, now that many countries have already suffered the tolls of disasters worsened by climate change — a sign that 2°C of warming would be far worse.”
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“The core injustice of climate change is that the people who contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most.”
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“a key part of the discussion at COP26 will be around how to compensate countries facing the impacts of climate change today, from rising sea levels eroding shores to more devastating extreme weather.”
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“The US has the dubious distinction of being the only country to complete a 360-degree turn on the Paris agreement. It helped convene the accord in 2015, yet former President Trump withdrew the US in 2020. President Biden signed an executive order in January to rejoin and the US was formally back in the Paris accord in February.
Since the US is the wealthiest country in the world and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, it plays a prominent role in climate negotiations and has an even greater obligation to act on the crisis. At COP26, the US not only has to make up for lost time, it also has to rebuild trust with other countries and show that it’s willing to be more ambitious.”
“Corporations and countries around the world are promising to eliminate their contributions to climate change. But many of their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are prefaced by a slippery phrase: “net-zero.”
More than 130 countries have set or are considering net-zero emissions goals, and many are stepping up as they prepare for next week’s COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The United States, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Japan, and Argentina all aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The European Union aims to be “climate-neutral,” another way of framing net-zero. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia (the world’s top oil exporter) now have net-zero emissions targets.
Private companies are getting into the game, too. At least 20 percent of the 2,000 largest companies have set net-zero emissions targets, including giants like Apple, Ford, and Microsoft.
But “net-zero” is different from zero emissions, and this nebulous term can obscure a lot of important differences in how countries and companies actually plan to limit their contributions to climate change.”
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“When a country aims for net-zero emissions — as opposed to simply zero emissions — it’s essentially promising to balance out its climate pollution, so that overall, it doesn’t harm the global climate.
For example, if a factory owner can’t figure out how to eliminate their emissions with current technologies, they can pay to restore a mangrove swamp that will absorb an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If the mangrove absorbs roughly what the factory pollutes, the factory theoretically won’t contribute to warming. (The idea of net-zero sometimes goes beyond carbon dioxide and accounts for other heat-trapping gases, like methane.)
In principle, the idea of net-zero offers countries and companies flexibility in meeting climate goals. But in practice, critics say that net-zero pledges delay meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases and provide cover to those unwilling to take immediate steps to limit emissions.”
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“In the context of climate change, the atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions are coming from or where they go, just the overall quantity that makes it into the sky. So in theory, matching greenhouse gas outputs with withdrawals can eliminate impacts on the climate.
However, it takes a lot of work to truly counter the damage of emissions. “I think just saying, ‘I’m going to be net-zero,’ with no concrete plans to achieve that goal, is not legitimate,” said Kelley Kizzier, vice president for global climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. “We have to understand what that company or country is going to do to make that a reality.””
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“There is no substitute for reducing overall emissions. Preventing greenhouse gases from spewing into the sky in the first place is the most meaningful and straightforward way to curb humanity’s impact on the climate. That means phasing out fossil fuels like oil and gas as completely as possible, as quickly as possible.
This also has positive effects beyond mitigating climate change. A smokestack can pollute its neighborhood and make people sick, even if a forest is counteracting its CO2 emissions, for example. Compared to net emissions reductions, “The marginal benefits of [total] emissions reductions and avoided emissions are far higher,” according to Broekhoff.
Another concern is that there are only so many options out there for balancing emissions. If too many companies and governments try to buy their way to net-zero emissions without making their own reductions, there won’t be enough carbon-absorbing tactics to go around. The largest burden of reducing emissions may then end up falling on the people with the fewest means to do so.
A strong net-zero emissions plan should therefore have large and immediate reductions in absolute emissions at its core.”
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“Despite these challenges, some experts say it is possible to create viable offsets with proper measurement and verification. And given the amount that humans have already polluted, it may soon be necessary not just to zero out human impacts on the climate but to achieve net negative emissions — that is, withdraw more CO2 from the air than goes in.
Every scenario for stabilizing the global climate around 1.5°C of warming involves net-negative emissions after the middle of the century, the IPCC reported in 2018. Its low-end estimate was that humanity would have to withdraw 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the air by 2100, roughly double the amount that humanity produces in a year today. The high-end estimate was 1,000 gigatons.”
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“many of the newer commitments are inward-looking, focused solely on emissions within national borders and ignoring their exports of fossil fuels.
Australia, for example, published a proposal for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 that relies heavily on investments in low-emissions technologies. But its interim target for 2030 hasn’t budged. And while Australia’s government expects domestic greenhouse gas emissions to fall, it remains the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter and will continue selling coal and natural gas abroad. “Australia’s coal and gas export industries will continue through to 2050 and beyond, supporting jobs and regional communities,” according to the plan.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2060 and is investing $186 billion in cutting its emissions, but it expects to continue exporting oil in the meantime. Even the US has urged countries like Saudi Arabia to boost oil production to stimulate the global economy.
Norway, which is aiming to cut its domestic emissions by 55 percent by 2030, is also aiming to expand its oil and gas industry. As long as these countries are extracting fossil fuels and inviting other countries to burn them, they’ll never be able to credibly claim that they are having zero impact on the global climate. In fact, they’re profiting from this destruction.”
“The story goes something like this: Tiny marine organisms called phytoplankton absorb carbon from the water and air around them. As the plankton are eaten by increasingly larger creatures, the carbon then travels up the food chain and into fish. Those fish then release a lot of it back into the ocean through their poop, much of which sinks to the seafloor and can store away carbon for centuries. The scientific term for carbon storage is sequestration.
“We think this is one of the most effective carbon-sequestration mechanisms in the ocean,” Bianchi told Vox. “It reaches the deep layers, where carbon is sequestered for hundreds or thousands of years.”
Carbon that’s stored in the deep sea is carbon that’s not making the oceans more acidic or trapping heat in the atmosphere. In other words, fish poop could be a bulwark against climate change.
The problem is that commercial fishing has sliced the global fish population to a fraction of its former level. As scientists figure out the importance of fish poop, they’re also recognizing a new danger of large-scale fishing. Beyond putting ecosystems at risk, the industry is messing with big nutrient cycles — and perhaps eating into an important carbon sink.”
“Passed in 1969, NEPA requires federal agencies to study the environmental impacts of actions they take, whether that’s funding a new highway or approving a new pipeline. Over the decades, the burden imposed by NEPA has grown: The environmental reviews it mandates take years on average to complete and can run hundreds if not thousands of pages.
Donald Trump’s administration tried to streamline things a bit by limiting the environmental effects that agencies had to examine and by putting definitive time and page limits on NEPA reviews.
Even those marginal changes, implemented in September 2020, proved controversial with many environmentalists. Their concerns have resonated with the Biden administration.
“The basic community safeguards we are proposing to restore would help ensure that American infrastructure gets built right the first time, and delivers real benefits—not harms—to people who live nearby,” said CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory on Thursday.
The proposed rule published by the CEQ in the Federal Register would make a number of changes.
Most significantly, it would restore requirements that agencies’ NEPA reviews take into account the indirect and cumulative effects of projects.”
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“Environmentalist groups have generally praised these changes.”
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“Other NEPA experts are more critical, arguing that this is an ineffective and potentially counterproductive way to address climate change.
“All it does is create a little more paperwork,” says Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity. “Given the need to build a lot of infrastructure and new technologies and physical stuff in the world, NEPA is probably on net harming our response to climate change.”
Indeed, NEPA has slowed down a number of projects that environmentalists would typically support for their emission-reducing potential.
The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 2019 decision to perform a cumulative impact analysis under NEPA of a massive wind farm being constructed off the coast of Massachusetts has significantly delayed that project.
It will likewise take years for the federal government to perform a NEPA-mandated review of a plan to charge drivers a toll to enter lower Manhattan. Environmentalists and transit advocates have generally praised that congestion pricing plan for its potential to reduce carbon emissions and to raise money for public transit. The tolls were supposed to be up and running in January 2021. The need to perform an environmental assessment for the project will mean that it now won’t start until 2023 at the earliest.
All the additional green investments the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress want to fund with their $1 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation could run into a similar fate.
“It’s making some of the infrastructure projects they want to do radically more expensive,” says Neil Chilson, a senior research fellow at Stand Together. He says the regulatory changes will also empower the nation’s NIMBYs to slow down projects they dislike.”
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“By expanding the number of effects that have to be considered in the NEPA process, the Biden administration is giving project opponents more room to claim that an environmental review is insufficient.
Federal agencies and private project sponsors, in turn, will have to spend more time preparing litigation-proof environmental documents to preempt these complaints, says Chilson.
That could be particularly damaging for solar plants that are proposed to be constructed on public lands in the American west, and which have attracted fierce opposition from local groups concerned about their impact on endangered species and recreational lands.”
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“CEQ has said that reversing those Trump-era tweaks is only the first phase of its planned rulemaking. In a second phase, the administration says, it plans to make more substantive changes that create “efficient and effective environmental reviews.”
That leaves open the possibility that we’ll get more productive reforms later on, says Dourado.”
“there is one surprising area that’s so far survived the congressional gauntlet as part of a big climate spending proposal: forest management and conservation. The bill — which Democrats are trying to pass with a simple Senate majority using the reconciliation process — allocates roughly $27 billion for spending related to federal, state, and tribal forests.
While that’s just a sliver of the roughly $1.75 trillion spending package, it’s an enormous and historic number, said Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s the most significant investment ever in our national forests,” O’Mara told Vox. “It’s an astonishingly big deal.”
A large chunk of those funds would go toward preventing wildfires — which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and have devastated Western towns — and toward more equitable access to green spaces. The bill would also set aside billions of dollars for ecosystem restoration and more environmentally friendly farming practices.
Biden’s framework reveals that conserving forests and biodiversity is a core component of the nation’s plan to tackle climate change, as many scientists say it should be: Trees and soil are a natural sink for carbon dioxide, making forests a key solution for cutting climate pollution. Yet for decades, biodiversity conservation and climate change have largely been considered separate issues. The bill also shows that the US government has recognized the growing threat of climate-fueled wildfires and is willing to fund the Forest Service to do something about it.”
“While many answers to climate change require national and even international action, cities often have the unilateral power to craft local rules like building codes. But before the city of Tucson could even look at possible building reforms, the Republican-led state legislature took away its power to do so — by passing a state law that natural gas utilities are “not subject to further regulation by a municipality.”
Supporters of the Republican bill were trying to beat climate advocates to the punch and “preempt” restrictions on fossil fuels. “We wanted to get ahead of what we viewed as an economically damaging trend, and stop it before it could gain a foothold here,” says Garrick Taylor, a spokesperson for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, one of the lobbying groups that supported the bill.
With those few lines of text, Arizona blocked a path for cleaning up a significant source of Tucson’s climate pollution — even as nations around the world are racing to transition to cleaner energy and slow disastrous climate change.”
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“Arizona was the first of many US states where “localities are cut off at the knees, because they’re in states where lawmakers are hostile” to these kinds of climate regulations, says Sheila Foster, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in urban environmental law.
Interest groups for the natural gas industry, worried about losing energy customers, have now promoted bills in half the country to strip cities of basic powers to set greener building codes and help phase out fossil-fuel pollution. These “preemption” laws have swept through 20 state legislatures; three more states have bills pending this year.”
“In 1985, atmospheric scientists in Antarctica noticed something troubling. For decades, they’d been measuring the thickness of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, the layer of gas that deflects much of the sun’s radiation. Starting in the 1970s, it had started plummeting. By the mid-1980s, they observed that it was on track to be wiped out in the next few decades.
Their discovery was cause for worldwide alarm and unprecedented action. In short order, the international community marshaled its resources — scientific, economic, diplomatic — to mount a campaign to ban the chemical that caused the damage, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and to restore the ozone layer.
Fast-forward to today: The ozone is on the path to recovery, if not fully restored. That progress hasn’t been without setbacks. The ozone hole is shrinking on average, but some years are bad ones — the hole was notably larger in 2020, following a 2019 when it was unusually small. Researchers have also raised suspicions that the rate at which atmospheric CFCs are falling suggests not all signatories to a treaty banning new production of CFCs are abiding by the agreement. And there have been unintended consequences in phasing out CFCs with a different chemical that has hurt our fight against climate change (more on this below).
But the damage we wrought last century has been reversed. Even with the complications and caveats, the world’s response to the ozone crisis should be seen as an instructive, even inspiring, success story — one that can perhaps inform our response to the climate crisis.”