Offshore wind projects gaining momentum

The federal government is moving quickly to develop offshore wind farms along all three U.S. coasts. The Biden administration has set a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The latest news is a proposal for floating offshore wind projects along the Pacific Coast since California’s ocean waters are too deep for the fixed-bottom wind turbines that have been deployed off the Atlantic coast. 

The Interior Department plans to hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on December 6 for areas off central and Northern California. This will be the first offshore wind lease sale on the West Coast. The sale will include five lease areas totalling 373,268 acres. The large-scale projects that would be developed could one day generate more than 4.5 gigawatts of energy and power 1.5 million homes, the department said. By 2035, Interior aims to have 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind capacity. 

The announcement, reported Nichola Groom of Reuters, “is the latest in a government push to put wind turbines along U.S. coastlines, creating a new domestic jobs engine.”

Jobs are also top of mind along the Gulf Coast, where the Biden administration is planning to conduct additional lease sales. Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group that represents both the offshore oil and wind industries, said, “Steel fabricators, heavy lift vessel operators, marine construction firms, subsea engineers, seismic surveyors, and a host of other jobs and businesses that are integral to Gulf of Mexico oil and gas development are also building out American offshore wind,” Milito said in an email to The Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow. “There is a reason the first U.S.-built offshore wind substation is being constructed in Ingleside, Texas.”

Most of the offshore wind activity has been in New England and farther down the Atlantic Coast. New York State now has five offshore wind 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 nation-leading offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the other states moving forward to take advantage of their offshore winds.

President Biden has directed the Interior Department to pursue wind development off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, rescinding an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in 2020. Trump’s order banned all offshore energy development, including oil- and wind-power lease sales, in the southeast Atlantic.

Of course, there will be challenges in moving all these projects from the drawing boards. Some opponents of offshore turbines have asserted that they mar ocean scenery. That may not be an issue with the California proposals since the floating turbines would likely be more than 20 miles offshore. But, as The Wall Street Journal’s Katy Stech Ferek pointed out, “there are potential conflicts with the commercial fishing boats, the shipping industry, marine researchers, tourists and the U.S. military. Those include everything from worries about sea turtles and other marine life to obstacles such as shipping routes and underwater telecommunication cables.”

The nation’s first offshore wind project, off Block Island along the Rhode Island coast, started generating electricity in late 2016. With a boost from the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, the United States is now on the verge of a giant leap forward. That appears to be true internationally, as well. Offshore wind will account for 25 percent of global renewables investments in 2030, up from six percent in 2020, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates.  

Human Health Continues to Suffer due to Climate Change

Tackling climate change is important for the health of the planet, right? Absolutely. But too few Americans make the connection between climate change and human health–and the financial toll of those health problems. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”

Axios reported that the world faces “a climate change-fueled health crisis — from increased emergency department visits due to heatstroke, exacerbated asthma and even heart attacks to injuries and illness linked to severe storms,” such as Hurricane Ian.

Let’s start with extreme heat. You may recall that in the summer of 2021 Seattle hit 108 degrees, some 30 degrees above normal. About 600 additional people died over a week in Oregon and Washington. Writing in Time magazine, Dr. Sameed Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania reported that two recent studies of the contiguous U.S. found that from 2008 to 2017, between 13,000 and 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat.  

Climate change, Axios reported, has also been linked to increased risks for kidney disease, obesity and diabetes, injuries, the transmission of infectious diseases, some cancers and poorer mental health. “We are learning more and more that the combustion of fossil fuels is contributing to a massive epidemic of chronic disease around the world that dwarfs AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined,” said Gary Cohen, president and founder of Health Care Without Harm, a group that focuses on reducing health care's carbon footprint.

Wildfire is another growing threat related to climate change, especially in the West. Those fires kill a number of people, including firefighters, and they destroy homes and other buildings. But they also pollute the air. Researchers found a 27-fold increase over the past decade in the number of people experiencing an “extreme smoke day,” which is defined as air quality deemed unhealthy for all age groups. In 2020 alone, nearly 25 million people across the contiguous United States were affected by dangerous smoke, Mira Rojanasakul reported in The New York Times.

“We have been remarkably successful in cleaning up other sources of air pollution across the country, mainly due to regulation like the Clean Air Act,” said Marshall Burke, a co-author of the research and professor of earth system science at Stanford. “That success, especially in the West, has really stagnated. And in recent years this started to reverse.” 

The research, Rojanasakul wrote, indicates that wildfire smoke could be a leading cause of that reversal, wiping out most of the progress. Particulate pollution causes more than short-term irritation. It has been linked to chronic heart and lung conditions, as well to cognitive decline, depression and premature birth. 

Then there’s infectious disease. More than half of the infectious diseases known to affect humans are being aggravated by climate change, scientists reported recently in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. The research found that illnesses like hepatitis, cholera, malaria, and hundreds of others were spreading faster, expanding in range, and becoming more severe because of climate-related events.

It’s not just transmission that’s increasing; climate change is also making it harder to fight off these diseases by reducing people’s health, immunity, and access to medical care, the researchers concluded. 

“The environment harbors dozens of other carriers of illnesses you’ve probably never heard of,” Zoya Teirstein wrote in Grist. They come from bugs, shellfish, and even soil. With global temperatures rising, well-known vector-borne illnesses are becoming more common, and other, lesser-known diseases are spreading into new areas.

These illnesses will “continue to tax our public health and medical care systems for years to come,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites they spread can cause joint pain, skin lesions, long-term memory problems — even death. 

Then there’s hunger. The number of people experiencing extreme hunger has more than doubled in some of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, Oxfam International said in a new report. Some 48 million people are now suffering from acute hunger, and nearly 18 million of those people are on the brink of starvation. Conflict remains the primary driver of hunger, but “the onslaught of climate disasters is now outpacing poor people’s ability to cope, pushing them deeper into severe hunger,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

The report found a strong correlation between extreme weather and rising hunger in 10 climate hot spots, wrote Karina Tsui in The Washington Post. “Climate change is no longer a ticking bomb,” said Bucher. “It is exploding before our eyes.”.

These soaring costs are not included in the prices of fossil fuels. They are what economists call “external costs.” We believe that fossil fuel prices should include such costs. If Congress opted for an honest price by enacting a carbon fee, there would be stronger incentives to speed the transition to clean energy.

More sobering news from the Greenland ice sheet

The accelerating loss of Greenland’s ice sheet could raise sea levels much more than previously believed, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change. 

In August four leaders from the Partnership for Responsible Growth visited Greenland, the world’s largest island, to learn more about the problem from scientists and other experts. “It is increasingly clear that flood events are likely to become even more severe and frequent,” said John Englander, a member of our Advisory Board and the founder and president of the Rising Seas Institute. He has authored two books on the subject and advocates what he terms “intelligent adaptation.”

Greenland is now the largest single ice-based contributor to global sea-level rise, surpassing contributions from both the larger Antarctic ice sheet and from mountain glaciers globally. Greenland lies in the Arctic, which is warming much faster than the rest of the world. 

To that end, about 3.3 percent of the ice sheet's total mass is likely to be lost without any further warming, according to the new study’s lead author, Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. That would trigger nearly a foot of global sea-level rise. 

The figures are a global average for sea level rise. Some places farther away from Greenland would get more and places closer, like the U.S. East Coast, would get less.

Researchers told Axios the findings are conservative, both due to quirks in its methods and to the assumption that no further global warming will take place, which is a highly unlikely scenario. “It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” Box asserted. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

“In fact,” said PRG co-founder and CEO Bill Eacho, “the scientists we consulted in Greenland are quite certain that the sea level rise will be significantly greater than the 10.6 inches that this study projected just from Greenland.”

“Every study has bigger numbers than the last. It’s always faster than forecast,” said

William Colgan, a co-author who studies the ice sheet from its surface with his colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

The major issue with the new study is the lack of a time horizon attached to the predictions, according to Sophie Nowicki, an ice sheet expert at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the research. Do you get that number by 2100, she wrote in an email to The New York Times’ Elena Shao, “or in thousands and thousands of years?” 

The study’s authors “suggested much of it can play out between now & the year 2100,” wrote The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney. Englander added, “It’s impossible to precisely predict the rate of Greenland and Antarctic melting, but five to10 feet is now a realistic range for global mean sea level rise by end-of-century.”

“Obviously, the number of variables in sea level predictions is almost infinite,” noted PRG Advisory Board member Julia Nesheiwat, who also made the trip to Greenland. “How quickly will the world diversify its energy resources to lower Co2 emissions? How much will sea level & temperature rise as we move through the 21st Century? Can carbon capture have a significant impact?” A member of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, Dr. Nesheiwat has served in influential positions during the past four presidential administrations and as Florida’s first Chief Resilience Officer.

“It’s too bad we can’t send every member of Congress to Greenland,” observed PRG co-founder and chairman George Frampton, who directs the Climate Program at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. “Seeing things with your own eyes drives home the depth of the problem. I believe more of those elected officials would see the value of an honest climate price and other measures to combat climate change.” 

The New Climate Bill Deserves to Become Law

As a steamy July drew to a conclusion, with Americans challenged not only by intense heat but by deadly floods roaring through eastern Kentucky and St. Louis and wildfires out West, some rare good news emerged from the halls of Congress. Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer (NY) and Joe Manchin (WV) announced that they had agreed to a bill that, among other things, would take major steps forward on climate change. 

It’s a tad early to pop the corks on your bottle of champagne. Any number of problems could push this compromise off the rails before it rumbles down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office. But supporters are taking heart from the determination of powerful officials to see this legislation succeed.

If passed, the bill would cut annual emissions by as much as 44 percent by the end of this decade, according to a new set of analyses from three independent research firms, Robinson Meyer reported in The Atlantic. 

I was skeptical of it when we started doing the modeling,” Anand Gopal, the executive director of strategy at Energy Innovation, told Meyer. Energy Innovation is a nonpartisan policy group in San Francisco and prepared one of the three studies. “But now I’m convinced that this is a really meaningful action by the United States on climate in this decade.” 

The Manchin-Schumer bill wouldn’t get all the way to President Biden’s 2030 goal, said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor who leads the REPEAT Project. But, he told Meyer, it would get close enough that states, cities, companies, and EPA could get the country over the finish line. At its core, the bill has one idea that would help accomplish these cuts. “​​The biggest thing is, it makes clean energy cheap. That’s really the bottom line,” Jenkins said.

Like any compromise involving a controversial issue, the bill contains provisions that trouble one side or another. As a group that believes strongly in the power of a carbon fee, we regret that the legislation does not contain one. And as The Washington Post pointed out, to secure Manchin’s vote, Democratic leadership pledged to mandate new oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska. That will only worsen the climate crisis.

However, "for every ton of emissions increases generated by [the bill's] oil and gas provisions, at least 24 tons of emissions are avoided by the other provisions," Energy Innovation concluded.

The bill “reflects a careful balancing of ambition with political pragmatism,” Stephanie Hanes wrote in The Christian Science Monitor. “It balances economic needs with environmental achievement, spends more on incentives rather than imposing penalties, and focuses on optimism as opposed to ecological doom – attributes that many analysts say make it more palatable than some past climate efforts.”

While opponents of climate action contend that it will come at a steep cost to Americans’ pocketbooks, Moody’s Analytics concluded that the bill "mitigates the economic cost of inaction." As Axios reported on those findings:

• They project that compared to a case with no additional climate policies, real GDP is 0.6% higher in 2050 and 2.7% higher by 2100.

• "The clear lesson is that upfront investments in addressing climate change reap substantial long-term economic benefits."

The Wall Street Journal told its readers that some clean-energy executives in areas like energy storage said they have already been getting more inquiries from potential customers and partners since the bill was introduced. “It is a really important signal to the market and companies like ours,” said Geoff Brown, CEO of the battery-storage company Powin LLC, which recently privately raised $135 million from investors including Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund.

If this bill becomes law, our nation will once again be a credible leader in the fight against climate change. “You can’t preach temperance from a bar stool,” Markey said in 2008, adding last week that “you can’t ask China, India, Brazil or other countries to cut emissions if we’re not doing it ourselves in a significant way.”

Environmental champion Bill McKibben is one of those who had to have winced at some of the elements of the compromise, noting in The New Yorker that the bill “reflects not just the growing strength of the climate movement but also the lingering power of the fossil-fuel industry.” But he believes that “the political trade-off is worth it.” 

“Taken as a whole,” McKibben concluded, “the bill is a triumph.” If you agree, please encourage your senators and representative to support it. Today.

Supreme Court ruling = another reason we need a carbon fee

The wreckage from the U.S. Supreme Court's June 30 decision limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions is the latest evidence that our nation needs a carbon fee.

More than 3,600 economists, including 28 Nobel laureates, have said that such a fee “offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future.”

Trying to achieve significant reductions in power plant emissions via federal regulations, while worthy, is proving exceedingly difficult. The coal industry and attorneys general from GOP-led states proved that June 30 when they derailed EPA’s efforts to do so. How many more years will it take for EPA to overcome such hurdles? We can’t wait.

“The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision maker on climate policy,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, said that the Supreme Court was insisting on a clear statement from what it knows is an “effectively dysfunctional” body. “The Court threatens to upend the national government’s ability to safeguard the public health and welfare at the very moment when the United States, and all nations, are facing our greatest environmental challenge of all: climate change,” Lazarus wrote in an email.

In response to today's ruling, Politico reported, 24 governors reaffirmed their commitments to wring carbon from the power sector. We applaud their determination, but we need strong action at the federal level.

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has led the effort on Capitol Hill to put a price on carbon. With Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and other colleagues, he is sponsoring the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act (S. 1128). It is now clearer than ever that this is the real solution to the climate change challenge..