We certainly need cheap renewables like solar, coupled with batteries, to clean our grid and mitigate climate change. But these technologies also hold incredible promise as economic development lifelines for remote indigenous communities.
The Guardian recently profiled a growing indigenous renewable energy alliance in Australia:
Only a handful of Indigenous communities have embarked on renewable energy projects in Australia. The Indigenous-owned and -operated company AllGrid Energy, for instance, has installed solar panels and battery storage systems to replace diesel generators in the Aboriginal communities of Ngurrara and Kurnturlpara in the Northern Territory’s Barkly Tableland. Within two months of the system being installed in May 2016, people were moving back to their homelands from Tennant Creek, the communities growing from just two permanent residents to about 40.
As these technologies become cheaper, not only will the developed world benefit, but historically disadvantaged communities across the globe will have access to clean, cheap power for their hospitals, homes and businesses.
With the Trump administration putting the brakes on national climate efforts, such as the Clean Power Plan, action will shift to the states. But California is doing more than just reducing its own carbon footprint, it’s signing up cities and states around the world to commit to the same.
Capitol Public Radio ran a story yesterday on the “Under 2 MOU,” which is the memorandum that binds the coalition states to reduce greenhouse gases to under 2 degrees warming by 2100. International law students in a class I helped teach at Berkeley Law helped develop new strategies for their home country jurisdictions and were featured on the radio piece:
…Ken Alex, who oversees the organization for Jerry Brown, says the organization has little, if any, stable funding.“We’re learning, we’re building the airplane as we’re flying it,” Alex says. He notes the organization has more signatories than the Paris Agreement. “And oh by the way there are at least 10 languages.”He counts one full-time employee working on it. Instead, Under2 has largely relied on informal arrangements.For instance, a U.C. Berkeley professor who does work in Kenya helped Laikipia calculate its total emissions. Another class at Berkeley law school, made up of international students with law degrees in their home countries and taught by a former colleague of Alex’s, is scouting potential new allies.
The work of the international students is helping to identify new potential coalition partners and strategies for existing ones to follow through on their pledges. It’s a shining example of state and local leadership — around the world — at a time when our federal government appears to be moving backwards.
Yesterday was a frustrating day for those who care about tackling climate change. Donald Trump’s executive order to roll back most of the Obama Administration’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is probably a futile attempt to resuscitate the dying coal industry, while putting America’s climate leadership on ice for at least the next four years. In other words, it’s a pointless, counter-productive exercise.
Yet while the moves are disappointing, they’re not devastating. The executive order will set in motion a regulatory process that will take years to play out and that will likely face strong resistance from the courts. But they mean a giant delay in needed actions.
I commented on the moves yesterday in some media outlets in both Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. First, I appeared on KPCC radio’s AirTalk in Los Angeles, discussing the impact of the order.
In the afternoon, I spoke with ABC-7 News in the Bay Area. Video here:
So the action now will shift to the courts, and we’ll see what the administration does with the Paris agreement on climate change going forward.
Back in January, Berkeley Law and labor market researchers released a report on the economic and employment impacts of California’s ambitious climate policies on the San Joaquin Valley. The Economic Impacts of California’s Major Climate Programs on the San Joaquin Valley addressed compliance and investment costs as well as the benefits across the region.
Ultimately, our research team found that the economic benefits of California’s major climate programs exceed costs. It was the first comprehensive, academic study of the costs and benefits of these policies on this economically and environmentally distressed region.
To discuss the findings, the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) at Berkeley Law will host a one-hour webinar with the report authors on Wednesday from 1 to 2pm. In addition to yours truly, the webinar will feature:
- Betony Jones, UC Berkeley Labor Center
- F. Noel Perry, Next 10
You can register for this event here. Hope you can tune in and ask your questions!
If there’s one area where Trump is likely to have legislative success, it’s probably the budget and taxes. A partisan majority of Republicans in Congress will go along with any tax and spending cuts, leaving Trump in a good position to get his way. And his current budget proposal is nothing less than a full-scale assault on environmental protections and public health.
It’s a bad combination of Trump’s seemingly genuine antipathy to government regulations and his party being captured by big polluters in the oil and gas industry.
My UC Berkeley Law colleague Dan Farber runs through the numbers on Legal Planet, but they basically include massive cuts to environmental enforcement, restoration and monitoring, including on climate data, as well as eliminating research in clean energy.
The last part on clean energy cuts is particularly frustrating. I’ve blogged before about the success of ARPA-E, the most important governmental agency you’ve never heard of. It’s the “moonshot” agency that is funding breakthrough technologies in batteries, solar power and other vital technology. Since 2009, it has provided $1.3 billion in funding to more than 475 projects, of which 45 have then raised $1.25 billion in private sector funds.
So of course Trump and his allies want to eliminate the agency completely.
But all is not yet lost. The budget will go through a lot of sausage-making in Congress, and even many Republicans are invested in some of these programs, given the benefits they provide their districts.
But environmental and public health advocates will be starting from a tough position, and this is one area where Trump is likely to get a lot of what he wants.
Food may be the final frontier in environmental sustainability — specifically meat from animals. Meat production entails a huge environmental cost (let alone the morality concerns). Raising animals for slaughter involves significant agricultural production to produce the feed, which also causes pollution from fertilizers and energy inputs. And livestock like cows produces a lot of methane, which is a super-potent greenhouse gas.
That’s why a number of startups are looking at ways to produce meat from cells and other biological inputs, rather than from the animals themselves. Basically that means mimicking the natural process of producing meat from feed but not in an animal body.
I know it may sound weird, but if the food tastes good and isn’t bad for you, it would be a huge environmental — and economic — win.
And that’s because people are eating a lot meat, especially poultry, as the Wall Street Journal details:
U.S. consumers ate an average of 90.9 pounds of chicken apiece in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is nearly as much as beef and pork combined.
World-wide, about 61 billion chickens are raised for meat annually. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has projected that chicken—relatively cheap to produce and with few religious and cultural barriers—will soar past pork as the world’s most-consumed meat by 2020.
Duck is relevant for a different reason. China, which tops the list in global consumption, consumes 2.7 million metric tons of duck meat annually, nearly 10 times the next-largest consumer, France, according to data from the International Poultry Council. The average Chinese consumer eats 4.5 pounds a year.
Now a new startup in the Bay Area appears to have developed a decent lab-produced chicken strip:
On Tuesday, Memphis Meats invited a handful of taste-testers to a San Francisco kitchen and cooked and served their chicken strip, along with a piece of duck prepared à l’orange style.
Some who sampled the strip—breaded, deep fried and spongier than a whole chicken breast—said it nearly nailed the flavor of the traditional variety. Their verdict: They would eat it again.
And not just environmentalists are taking notice. Cutting out the animal part of the equation could allow big meat companies to save a huge amount of money.
If entrepreneurs and scientists can figure this out, they will have done the planet (and many animals) a huge service.
To make any lasting progress on climate change, we’re going to need to be a whole lot more efficient with the energy we produce. That means retrofitting existing inefficient buildings as much as possible to reduce waste.
The dream would be to make a home or commercial building energy retrofit as easy and scalable as rooftop solar has become. But so far nobody seems to have figured out how to do it. There are some promising options, which we explored in a recent policy report called Powering the Savings.
But maybe the missing ingredient has been the insurance market. The idea is that if insurers are willing to back a home or business retrofit project, then financiers should be much more willing to bring Wall Street-type money to the effort on a mass scale. As PR Newswire reported:
Sealed, an energy software company that empowers homeowners to pay for home upgrades like insulation, air sealing, and smart thermostats with their energy savings, announced today the implementation of a residential energy efficiency insurance policy from The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company (HSB), part of Munich Re.
This innovative program insures the performance of Sealed’s proprietary energy analytics, which both removes energy savings performance risk from homes that finance energy efficiency improvements and increases the confidence of third party capital providers.
The key here is trusted and verifiable software that can measure actual energy saved via specific efficiency measures. With software improving to do just that, these kinds of financing arrangements will be just around the corner.
Want to know which counties in the U.S. accept climate science at the highest rates and which don’t? Which ones believe climate change is happening or that we should regulate carbon as a pollutant?
If that’s the case, then Yale has the interactive map for you. The school’s Program on Climate Change Communication just released its “Yale Climate Opinion Maps – U.S. 2016,” which breaks public opinion surveys down to the county level across the U.S.
It’s an easy-to-use map. While it doesn’t contain a huge amount of surprises (New England and the West Coast, particularly California, are pro-science accepters), it does reveal that climate science acceptance is actually fairly prevalent in red states. Standouts include southern and northern Arizona and much of South Texas. Montana, Idaho and South Dakota also have pretty striking pockets of science acceptance, as well as parts of Mississippi along the river to the northwest.
But there’s otherwise hard-core climate denial going on from the heart of Texas north through Nebraska, and throughout coal-country Appalachia (Kentucky and West Virginia).
The website is definitely an interesting way to spend a few minutes clicking around. Congratulations to Yale for putting it together.
Could California’s entire set of vehicle emission standards, including its zero-emission vehicle program that has helped launch the global electric vehicle market, come under federal assault? It’s a worst-case scenario that would require congressional action, but it’s amazingly within the realm of possibility.
California has unique authority under the federal Clean Air Act to regulate vehicle emissions. That authority requires the state to first seek a “waiver” from less-stringent federal standards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA always granted those waiver requests until the George W. Bush administration came along. His administration refused to grant a waiver for the state to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes.
California sued, but the Obama Administration took office before the case was resolved and then granted the waiver. But now new EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is looking not only to refuse to grant future waivers but possibly roll back previously granted ones (Buzzfeed covered the issue on Tuesday with some quotes from yours truly). It would be an unprecedented step that would be sure to be challenged in court.
But the even deeper concern is that the litigation might prompt Congress to revoke California’s waiver authority altogether. The Atlantic has a great piece on the situation, including this passage quoting Debbie Sivas at Stanford:
She feared that this fight in the courts would accompany a political fight in Congress, as the administration would seek to amend the Clean Air Act to remove California’s waiver power before they lost the lawsuit.
And—almost in preparation for that battle—she asked Americans to take a step back and examine why regulating greenhouse gases from cars is important.
“It feels like this very technical thing about, ‘blah blah, waivers, blah blah blah,’ but it’s a very important part of the climate policy,” Sivas told me. “People aren’t going to stop driving, really. And transportation’s 40 percent of carbon emissions. The only way to get [those emissions] down is to get [fuel] mileage up. If the feds are going to take their foot off the gas—and to fight the states who are doing it—it could be a huge setback,” said Sivas.
There’s a lot at stake in this fight. Federal fuel economy standards are prompted by California’s authority on the issue, and future standards could definitely be at risk. I have a lot of confidence in California’s legal team to fight this assault, but it would be a major setback for the time being.
But if Congress were to revoke the waiver status, and even retroactively apply it, the future of both cleaner gas-powered cars and the nascent electric vehicle market would be at tremendous risk.
