With Federal Aid on the Table, Utilities Shift to Embrace Climate Goals

As billions in government subsidies were at stake, the electric utility industry shed its opposition to clean-air regulation and put its lobbying muscle behind passing President Biden’s climate bill.

By Eric Lipton, New York Times, Nov. 29, 2022

WASHINGTON — Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution.

But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect.

Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their considerable clout in Washington: After years of taking steps like backing dark-money groups to sue the government to block tighter air pollution rules, DTE and a growing number of other utilities have joined forces to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.

Their new stance is driven less by evolving ideology than the changing economics of renewable energy, fueled in part by the sheer amount of money the federal government is putting on the table to encourage utilities to move more quickly to cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy like solar and wind.

In that way, it is a leading example of the effects of the Biden administration’s willingness to engage in what is often called industrial policy: providing public funding to bolster critical industries in support of the nation’s broad strategic goals.

But if industrial policy initiatives can provide powerful incentives to corporations to pursue those goals, they also inevitably raise questions about whether they are constructed in ways that reward companies for taking actions that market forces would lead them to take anyway — an issue that hovers over the legislation embraced by both Mr. Biden and the electric utilities.

With the passage of the climate and economic policy bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act, DTE and other big utilities like American Electric Power, NextEra Energy and Southern Company stand to benefit from the largest package of subsidies ever granted to the industry.

It is a 10-year, $220 billion hodgepodge of tax breaks and major changes in federal tax law and other climate-change-inspired inducements that amount to a kind of lobbyist wish list never before considered even remotely possible by the industry.

With so much on the line financially, the industry ramped up spending on lobbyists to help push the package through the House and the Senate. It has also directed at least $17 million in campaign contributions to lawmakers since last year, targeting in particular key players like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, whose consent was vital to getting the measure passed.

The legislation will do more than just accelerate efforts to meet climate change goals, according to an analysis by The New York Times of the 273-page law.

Buried in the hundreds of pages are carefully crafted provisions that will eventually help electric utilities gain additional profits for years to come, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars per year for some of the larger players, according to Wall Street analysts.

In the course of its two-year lobbying effort, the industry managed to help knock out of the legislation measures that would have mandated actions to curb pollution, largely leaving only those provisions that rewarded it for doing so — in effect securing more carrots while tossing aside the stick.

“Let’s be honest — these guys can say all they want about the environment and how we are all aligned,” said Shahriar Pourreza, who has spent two decades studying the utility industry for Wall Street firms. “But you strip back the layers of the onion and this is also a major long-term growth opportunity for these utilities.”

Mr. Anderson, who stepped down as chairman of DTE this past summer but still serves as an officer with the utility trade association’s foundation, said his commitment to the package reflected a conviction that utilities must help confront climate change.

“Everybody figured out this is the future,” he said, while on the South Lawn, just before Mr. Biden celebrated the passage of the legislation. “This is something we need to be for. That we should be for. It was a sea change in our mind-set.”

But in a follow-up interview, Mr. Anderson, who participated in more than 120 personal appeals to members of Congress to help push the legislation through, agreed that the terms were attractive for the industry.

The benefits come in part from the extension of about-to-expire tax breaks for the industry for as long as two decades, a provision that alone is worth more than $120 billion. Lawmakers also significantly expanded the kinds of things utilities can spend money on and still get a generous tax break for, like new energy storage equipment.

The new law also allows utilities that build clean-energy installations to sell large chunks of their tax perks to other companies or Wall Street investors, even those that have no connection to the energy industry. In effect, the legislation is reviving a tax-law loophole that was revoked by Congress four decades ago after major American corporations — including General Electric — employed the provision so aggressively that it allowed them to avoid paying almost any federal income taxes despite enormous profits.

The law Congress passed is so generous — with tweaks pushed by industry lobbyists — that it surprised even some veteran corporate tax lawyers.

“The Capitol Hill tax staff, they tell us this is crazy, we are never going to do that,” said David Burton, a corporate tax lawyer whose clients include energy companies, recalling the reaction at first to the plan to revive the ability of companies to sell tax breaks to the highest bidder, known as transferability.

“It is like selling a used car,” he said. “I have the tax break and I can convey it to you. For a long time that has been absolutely contrary to U.S. tax policy. But now it is law.”

The energy companies are among the class of winners that is now emerging from the hundreds of billions in subsidies that the administration and Congress have approved over the last two years. Those winners also include battery makers, broadband providers, highway builders, mining companies, automakers and semiconductor manufacturers.

Mr. Biden’s acceptance of industrial policy initiatives is a defining feature of his administration. The result has been a federal government that has teamed up with the private sector at a scale unlike anything the United States has seen since at least the Depression or World War II, with potential economic and political risks as well as benefits.

Embracing Biden

They gathered in early February beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the White House’s State Dining Room, a room that has hosted countless world leaders over the decades. On that day it was filled by some of the top executives at the nation’s largest electric utility companies, including Mr. Anderson from DTE, as well as the bosses from Southern Company, American Electric Power, Duke Energy and several of the other giant utilities that dominate the nation’s power sector.

It was unseasonably mild for midwinter in Washington — the temperature reached 54 — and the agenda was global warming and what these companies could do, in an alliance with the White House, to help address it.

The power plants run by these executives are by far the single biggest source of carbon dioxide and other air pollution in the United States. The companies are all members of a powerful trade association called the Edison Electric Institute, which organized the gathering. Collectively, the members of E.E.I., as it is known, provide electricity to 235 million Americans in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia.

As members of the group sat around a large table, Mr. Biden was blunt about what was at stake as he pushed Congress to take steps toward meeting a goal of allowing the nation to produce all its electricity carbon free by 2035.

“I’ve spent too much time this last year flying in helicopters over areas of scorched earth,” Mr. Biden told them, referring to a rash of wildfires, blamed in part on climate change. “More territory is burned to the ground in the West Coast than the entire state of New Jersey in terms of square miles,” he added. “It’s just stunning. Absolutely stunning.”

Mr. Biden also let the assembled group know that he was well aware that many of them in the past were hardly ready to rally behind him, alluding to when he served as vice president during the Obama administration and also pushed, often in the face of industry opposition, for ambitious climate change measures.

During that period, utilities were secretly sending millions of dollars to a law firm that filed litigation on their behalf to block the Clean Power Plan, enacted during the Obama administration. They also made large donations to Republican attorneys general who filed their own lawsuits to overturn air pollution and climate rules.

E.E.I. members, in some cases, even organized their own sophisticated, but covert, political operations to try to block renewable energy mandates.

The owner of Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest electric utility, secretly donated more than $10 million to help elect state regulators who would sabotage renewable energy requirements it opposed.

The company denied for several years that it had played a role in the scheme, until the F.B.I. opened an investigation. The company was subpoenaed and then confessed in 2019 that it had bankrolled the dark-money push.

But despite that history of opposition to clean-air regulations, the industry in recent years has been abandoning coal, largely for economic reasons. Southern Company, which serves 4.4 million electric utility customers in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, has long had one of the largest fleets of coal-burning power plants, and it waged an intense fight to protect them, including donations to climate change skeptics.

But late last year, Southern Company announced that it intended to close all but three of its coal plants by 2028, cutting its coal fleet capacity by 80 percent compared with 2007, and replacing it mostly with solar, natural gas and nuclear power.

Part of the shift away from coal was driven by federal mandates that were going to force the company to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade the plants to reduce toxic water pollution sent into area rivers and streams. At the same time, natural gas had emerged as a plentiful, cleaner and more affordable alternative, and the costs of renewables like solar and wind were coming down rapidly.

By the time of the meeting with Mr. Biden in February, executives from Southern, like DTE and other utilities, were ready to tell the president that they were on board to support legislation that would accelerate the industry’s move away from coal by providing tax breaks and other inducements.

“Partners in the federal government can enable this industry to move much more quickly than we would have otherwise, particularly with the tax provisions,” Nick Akins, the chairman of American Electric Power, which serves five million customers in 11 states, told Mr. Biden.

Mr. Akins pointed out that much of the value of the tax breaks that were then under debate in Congress would be passed on to ratepayers, in the form of smaller future electric power rate increases, since the federal government would effectively be subsidizing the cost of the transition to cleaner burning fuels.

But renewables even without federal subsidies are now cheaper than coal, meaning that the market was already giving the utilities plenty of incentive to change how they produced power.

Nor did they mention at this meeting with Mr. Biden that credit rating agencies were pressuring them to move more quickly to clean up their energy production, or face higher costs to borrow money. They also did not detail how the federal subsidies, by changing the economics of the power industry, were going to increase their own profits.

Turning Tax Breaks Into Profits

No company is better positioned to cash in on the subsidies than NextEra Energy, which serves six million customers in Florida as well as millions more in 38 other states that rely on electricity produced from wind and solar installations it has built to supply other utilities.

For every dollar that utilities like NextEra spend to build solar installations, they should be able to get as much as 60 percent back in the form of a so-called investment tax credit under the new law, if they tap into various bonuses, like building in a low-income area where land has previously been polluted.

In regulated markets — where state officials control how much utilities can charge for electricity — that tax credit will directly benefit ratepayers because the utilities must pass on savings like this to customers. NextEra said in late October that tax credits on already negotiated solar projects in Florida will save customers nearly $400 million, compared with higher bills they would pay if the company made the same investments without the tax credit.

But this tax credit will eventually benefit NextEra’s bottom line as well, because the subsidies will also accelerate the utility’s own equity investments in solar and wind capacity and other renewables. And the company can take its approximately 10 percent profit on this bigger base of capital spending, as permitted by state regulation.

“If they now put $2 down instead of $1, instead of making 10 cents, now they are making 20 cents,” said Julien Dumoulin-Smith, who tracks NextEra for Bank of America. “The profits are going up that way.”

Elsewhere across the nation, NextEra plans to build an additional 37 gigawatts of renewable power over the next four years — enough to serve about 25 million homes — more than doubling its existing inventory, which is already the largest in the nation. It earns an even higher profit on those contracts as the investments are not regulated. It can also get tax credits on upgrades to its existing wind and solar projects and to add battery capacity to store renewable power — all again increasing profitability.

“We can put more capital to work at a good return,” said Rebecca J. Kujawa, the president of NextEra Energy Partners, the unregulated part of the company. “Now I have decades of visibility to being able to do that profitably.”

The tax subsidies have also increased the value of renewable projects owned by utilities, which is in part why many companies — including American Electric Power, North Carolina-based Duke Energy and Boston-based Eversource — are already putting some of them up for sale.

“It is a game changer,” Joe Nolan, the chief executive at Eversource, said in an interview, noting that it had spent $1 million six years ago to lease an offshore wind site that it now intends to sell, potentially for hundreds of millions of dollars. “There is no two ways about this.”

And that is just the start.

NextEra, based on previously granted subsidies, already has a $4.3 billion backlog of federal tax credits on its books — so much, in fact, that it has been unable to take advantage of them all, leading the company to carry them forward for use in future years.

The provision in the new law that will allow NextEra and other utilities to sell these tax credits to the highest bidder — including buyers that have nothing to do with the clean-energy business — gives them the opportunity to take in billions of dollars in cash payments in the coming years.

The offer is even sweeter when it comes to newer technologies, such as using hydrogen as a fuel source. Rather than waiting to claim the tax break after making certain kinds of these investments, utilities will be able to go to the Treasury Department and get a direct payment equal to the amount of the tax break as they bring it online — effectively a grant to cover part of the price tag.

The surge in inflation, interest rates and fuel prices has complicated the short-term profit picture, because regulated utilities will be under pressure to restrict capital spending as a way to limit rate increases, said Mr. Pourreza, the Wall Street analyst at Guggenheim Securities. The ability to use the tax credits years down the road also eliminates the urgency to shift further to renewables immediately.

But the overall financial benefits for many of these companies over the long term remains clear, he and other analysts said.

“More capital will be spent, and you’ll earn a higher return, which leads to higher margins and higher earnings growth,” Mr. Pourreza said. “It’s as simple as that.”

This smorgasbord of benefits inspired the big push by the utilities to persuade Congress to pass the proposals into law.

First came the tidal wave of campaign donations, which both shot up in total dollars and shifted from supporting Republicans who had worked to defeat climate change legislation to Democrats working to enact it.

NextEra, for example, whose political action committee and employees gave 90 percent of their campaign contributions to Republicans when President George W. Bush first entered office, has sent them only 43 percent in the 2022 political cycle, according to data assembled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Its single biggest beneficiary this election cycle: Mr. Schumer, who has collected more than $300,000 from the company’s employees or political committee. The next two top members of Congress on the list this cycle are Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, whose votes were vital to getting the tax breaks passed into law.

Donors to Mr. Manchin — in the days after his announcement this summer that negotiations to reach a deal had stalled — included Dominion Energy of Virginia, NextEra, Exelon of Chicago, PG&E of San Francisco, and the parent company of Arizona Public Service, campaign finance records show.

Executives at Ryan L.L.C. — a Texas-based tax consulting firm that says it has helped electric utility companies secure more than $267 million in tax breaks — sent 40 separate contributions to Mr. Manchin last year, making the company one of his largest contributors, just above NextEra.

Brian Wolff, who oversees lobbying at E.E.I., the trade group, said he met with Mr. Manchin or his staff at least 30 times. The trade association brought in top executives from utilities that serve West Virginia to explain to Mr. Manchin and his aides why the legislation would benefit his constituents.

“We were working hand in hand with him,” Mr. Wolff said. “And I think it was really a perfect fit. There wasn’t anything that we were for that he wasn’t for.”

NextEra alone had at least 48 lobbyists registered on its behalf this year, more than half of whom previously worked on Capitol Hill or in the federal government. They include Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma.

The industry also managed to keep out of the plan a measure that would have imposed potentially millions of dollars’ worth of penalties on utilities that did not move fast enough to reduce air pollution that causes climate change.

“There was a carrot and stick approach, but that wasn’t very helpful,” Mr. Wolff said, summarizing arguments he made to members of Congress. “If you are punitive to our companies, then you are going to be punitive to our customers.”

The legislation, as passed, was hailed by environmentalists. The White House described the final package as “the most aggressive action to combat the climate crisis and improve American energy security in our nation’s history.”

The tax incentives, according to a recent analysis by a Princeton University energy research laboratory, could result in five times as much utility-scale solar and twice as many new wind farms compared with 2020 levels.

And beyond reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the legislation is expected to reduce other forms of air pollution from fossil-fuel power plants, like sulfur dioxide, that cause asthma attacks and other potentially fatal ailments.

DTE Energy, for example, announced early this month a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when it was still being sued by the federal government as it defended its continued operations at the DTE Monroe coal-burning power plant.

The company has now raised the white flag: It is going to start the closure of the plant a dozen years sooner than planned by shutting down two coal-burning units in 2028, and it will close the plant entirely by 2035, which will be the end of coal for DTE. The plant is the third-largest source of carbon dioxide in the United States, emitting 15.7 million tons of the climate-changing pollutant last year.

DTE executives note that for their company, embracing the reduction of carbon emissions started at least six years ago. But moves like this are now happening across the industry.

“For many years we would be sitting in a room and we’d be on opposite ends,” said Mr. Nolan, the chief executive at Eversource, who was among the industry executives celebrating the legislation’s passage at the White House in September. “Now, they got to get on board. They can’t deny climate change.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/us/politics/electric-utilities-biden-climate-bill.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20221129&instance_id=78802&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=114484&te=1&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Draft Report Offers Starkest View Yet of U.S. Climate Threats

“The things Americans value most are at risk,” says a draft of the National Climate Assessment, a major federal scientific report slated for release next year.

By Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong, NY Times, Nov. 8, 2022

WASHINGTON — The effects of climate change are already “far-reaching and worsening” throughout all regions in the United States, posing profound risks to virtually every aspect of society, whether it’s drinking water supplies in the Midwest or small businesses in the Southeast, according to a draft scientific report being circulated by the federal government.

The draft of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s premier contribution to climate knowledge, provides the most detailed look yet at the consequences of global warming for the United States, both in the present and in the future. The final report isn’t scheduled to be published until late 2023, but the 13 federal agencies and hundreds of scientists who are compiling the assessment issued a 1,695-page draft for public comment on Monday.

“The things Americans value most are at risk,” says the draft report, which could still undergo changes as it goes through the review process. “More intense extreme events and long-term climate changes make it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families, reliable public services, a sustainable economy, thriving ecosystems and strong communities.”

As greenhouse gas emissions rise and the planet heats up, the authors write, the United States could face major disruptions to farms and fisheries that drive up food prices, while millions of Americans could be displaced by disasters such as severe wildfires in California, sea-level rise in Florida or frequent flooding in Texas.

“By bringing together the latest findings from climate science, the report underscores that Americans in every region of the country and every sector of the economy face real and sobering climate impacts,” said John Podesta, a senior adviser to President Biden on clean energy, adding that the draft report was still undergoing scientific peer review and public comment.

The assessment isn’t entirely fatalistic: Many sections describe dozens of strategies that states and cities can take to adapt to the hazards of climate change, such as incorporating stronger building codes or techniques to conserve water. But in many cases, the draft warns, adaptation efforts are proceeding too slowly.

“The old narrative that climate change is something that’s happening to polar bears or it’s going to happen to your grandchildren — that was never true, but it is now obviously not true,” said one of the report’s authors, Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “There’s bad stuff happening now where we can very confidently say, ‘This wouldn’t have happened without climate change.’”

Under a law passed by Congress in 1990, the federal government is required to release the National Climate Assessment every four years, with contributions from a range of scientists across federal agencies as well as outside experts. The last assessment, released in 2018, found that unchecked warming could cause significant damage to the U.S. economy.

The Trump administration tried, but largely failed, to halt work on the next report, and its release was pushed back to 2023.

The draft report comes as world leaders are meeting in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, this week for the annual United Nations climate change summit. This year’s talks are focused on the harm that global warming is inflicting on the world’s poorest nations and the question of what rich countries should do to help. But the forthcoming U.S. assessment will offer a stark reminder that even wealthy nations will face serious consequences if temperatures keep rising.

The United States has warmed 68 percent faster than Earth as a whole over the past 50 years, according to the draft report, with average temperatures in the lower 48 states rising 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) during that time period. That reflects a global pattern in which land areas are warming faster than oceans are, and higher latitudes are warming faster than lower latitudes are as humans heat up the planet, primarily by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal for energy.

Americans can now feel the effects of climate change in their everyday lives, the draft says. In coastal cities like Miami Beach, Fla., the frequency of disruptive flooding at high tide has quadrupled over the last 20 years as sea levels have risen. In Alaska, 14 major fishery disasters have been linked to changes in climate, including an increase in marine heat waves. In Colorado, ski industries have lost revenue because of declining snowfall.

Across the country, deadly and destructive extreme weather events such as heat waves, heavy rainfall, droughts and wildfires have already become more frequent and severe.

In the 1980s, the nation suffered an extreme weather disaster that caused at least $1 billion in economic damage about once every four months, on average, after adjusting for inflation. “Now,” the draft says, “there is one every three weeks on average.” Some extreme events, like the Pacific Northwest heat wave last year that killed at least 229 people, would have been virtually impossible without global warming.

Bigger hazards are on the way if global temperatures keep rising, the draft report says, although the magnitude of those risks will largely depend on how quickly humanity can get its fossil fuel emissions under control.

“When we look to the future, we can’t say with any certainty that, ‘Oh, we’re safe at 2 degrees, we’re safe at 1.5 degrees,’” Dr. Marvel said. “We don’t know exactly how the carbon cycle is going to change. We don’t know exactly how warm it’s going to get.” But what’s clear, she said, is that “the primary determinant of the future” is what humans do in the present.

The Biden administration has set a goal for the United States to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to stop adding planet-warming pollution to the atmosphere altogether by 2050. But while America’s emissions have fallen in recent years, the report says, current efforts are “not sufficient” and emissions would need to decline at a much faster pace, by more than 6 percent per year, to meet that 2050 target.

And even if drastic action on emissions is taken today, the United States will still face rising climate risks through at least 2030 because of lags in the climate system — in other words, it would take some time for reductions in emissions to have an effect on the climate. That means every state in the country will need to take steps to adapt to growing hazards.

There are some encouraging signs. At least 18 states have now written formal adaptation plans, with another six in the works. Cities and communities across the country are increasingly aware of the dangers of global warming and are taking actions to protect themselves.

Yet many of those adaptation efforts are poorly funded and remain “incremental,” the draft says, instead of the “transformative” changes that are likely to be necessary to deal with climate effects. Instead of merely installing more air-conditioning in response to heat waves, cities could redesign buildings and parks to help stave off heat. In addition to elevating individual homes above floodwaters, states will need to redirect development from flood-prone areas.

The authors of the draft report also note that many risks from climate change may be hard to predict and defend against. As the planet warms, the dangers of “compound events” grow. In 2020, for example, a combination of record-breaking heat and widespread drought created large, destructive wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington that exposed millions of people to hazardous smoke and stretched firefighting resources.

And it is hard to foresee how American society will react to other potentially wrenching changes produced by global warming, which, the draft report says, could also include increased crime and domestic violence, harm to mental health and reduced opportunities for outdoor recreation. “These compounding stressors can increase segregation, reliance on social safety net programs and income inequality,” the report says.

Coral Davenport contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/climate/national-climate-assessment.html?searchResultPosition=1

Oceans are warming faster than ever. Here’s what could come next.

A paper finds that the upper reaches of the ocean have been heating up since the 1950s.

By Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2022

The world’s oceans have been warming for generations, a trend that is accelerating and threatens to fuel more supercharged storms, devastate marine ecosystems and upend the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, according to a new scientific analysis.

Published this week in the journal Nature Reviews, it finds that the upper reaches of the oceans — roughly the top 2,000 meters, or just over a mile — have been heating up around the planet since at least the 1950s, with the most stark changes observed in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.

The authors of the review, who include scientists from China, France, the United States and Australia, write that data shows the heating has both accelerated over time and increasingly has reached deeper and deeper depths. That warming — which the scientists said likely is irreversible through 2100 — is poised to continue, and to create new hotspots around the globe, especially if humans fail to make significant and rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

The findings underscore both the key role the oceans have played in helping to offset human emissions — oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped within the world’s atmosphere — and also the profound implications if the warming continues unabated. If it does, the areas near the surface of the oceans could warm by two to six times their current temperature, the scientists wrote.

“Global warming really does mean ocean warming,” Kevin E. Trenberth, a co-author of the review and a scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an interview from New Zealand. “The best single indicator that the planet is warming is the ocean warming record.”

U.N. climate report: Monumental change already here for world’s oceans and frozen regions

That record, comprised of thousands of temperature measurements across the globe over decades, he said, shows a “relentless” trajectory. “The warming has been accelerating, and the most rapid warming rates have been in the last 10 years or so,” he said.

The consequences of hotter oceans already are on display in numerous ways.

Scientists attribute about 40 percent of global sea level rise to the effects of thermal expansion in ocean water. Warmer oceans also speed the melting of ice sheets, adding to rising seas. They disrupt traditional weather patterns and deepen drought in some areas. And they fuel more intense hurricanes, as well as create the conditions for more torrential rainfall and deadly flooding.

The authors cite one example from August 2017, when the Gulf of Mexico reached the warmest summertime temperature on record to that point. That same month, Hurricane Harvey tore through the gulf, exploding from a tropical depression to a major hurricane and dumping catastrophic amounts of rain on Houston and other areas.

“All of these things are part of the fact that there’s extra energy available” in the oceans, Trenberth said.

In addition, the analysis found that future warming could cause precipitous drops in certain fisheries, causing the loss of livelihoods and food sources. The trend also makes it “inevitable” that marine heat waves will become more extensive and longer-lasting — a reality that can trigger toxic algal blooms and fuel massive mortality events among coral reefs, kelp forests and other ocean life.

Sea level to rise one foot along U.S. coastlines by 2050, government report finds

While the authors make clear that oceans around the world are projected to continue warming over the coming decades, even if humanity begins to cut greenhouse gas emissions, that warming will not happen equally across the globe. Largely due to circulation patterns, some regions are projected to warm faster than others and are likely to grapple with more intense impacts.

The paper also underscores that while many uncertainties remain, how that plays out is “critical” to the consequences humans will likely experience, said Joellen Russell, a professor and oceanographer at the University of Arizona.

“A small fraction more [mixing] would slow our warming, and a small fraction less mixing would accelerate our warming,” said Russell, who was not involved in this week’s analysis. “That is incredibly important for people to understand.”

The latest findings are largely in line with the growing body of research has documented — that oceans have long stored astounding amounts of energy from the atmosphere and mitigated the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, but that over time profound impacts are unavoidable on land and at sea.

In its most recent assessment on the state of climate science earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it is “virtually certain” that the upper swath of the oceans have warmed over the past half-century, and that human-caused carbon emissions are the main driver.

“Global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in at least the last 3,000 years,” the IPCC wrote. “The global ocean has warmed faster over the past century than since the end of the last deglacial transition (around 11,000 years ago).”

Still, researchers say the amount of future warming depends on what humans do — or don’t do — to rein-in the greenhouse gases that ultimately are heating oceans. And better measuring, understanding and mitigating the problem should be a global priority.

If the world can steer toward a future with the kind of rapidly shrinking emissions envisioned by the Paris climate agreement, the author of this week’s review write, that would likely “lead to a detectable and lasting reduction in [the] ocean warming rate, with noticeable reductions in climate-change impacts.”

Russell said the latest findings emphasize that it “absolutely matters” that humans cut emissions as quickly as possible, to limit warming in the oceans and the ripple effects that ultimately has for humans.

“Our oceans are doing us a profound service,” she said. “As a scientist and a mom, I pray about the fact we need to bend that curve in my lifetime. … It is important that we do this.”

Chris Mooney contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/19/oceans-warming-climate-change/

The Climate Economy Is About to Explode

A new report suggests that the Inflation Reduction Act could be even bigger than Congress thinks.

By Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, Oct. 5, 2022

Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a research note about America’s new climate law that went nearly unnoticed. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank argued, is even more important than has been recognized so far: The IRA will “will have a profound effect across industries in the next decade and beyond” and could ultimately shape the direction of the American economy, the bank said. The report shows how even after the bonanza of climate-bill coverage earlier this year, we’re still only beginning to understand how the law works and what it might mean for the economy.

The report made a few broad points in particular that are worth attending to: First, the IRA might spend twice as much as Congress thinks. Many of the IRA’s most important provisions, such as its incentives for electric vehicles and zero-carbon electricity, are “uncapped” tax credits. That means that as long as you meet their terms, the government will award them: There’s no budget or limit written into the law that restricts how much the government can spend. The widely cited figure for how much the IRA will spend to fight climate change—$374 billion—is in large part determined by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of how much those tax credits will get used.

But that estimate is wrong, the bank claims. In fact, so many people and businesses will use those tax credits that the IRA’s total spending is likely to be more than $800 billion, double what the CBO projects. And because federal spending tends to catalyze private investment, that could send total climate spending across the economy to roughly $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s significantly more money flowing into green-energy industries than the CBO projected, though it’s unclear if that additional money will lead to more carbon reductions than earlier analyses have projected.

Second, the U.S. is “poised to become the world’s leading energy provider,” according to the bank. America is already the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. The IRA could further enhance its advantage in all forms of energy production, giving it a “competitive advantage in low-cost clean electricity and hydrogen production, infrastructure, geologic storage, and human capital,” the report states. By 2029, U.S. solar and wind could be the cheapest in the world at less than $5 per megawatt-hour, the bank projects; it will also become competitive in hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and wind turbines. (The law will help America’s battery industry, but the bank doesn’t see the U.S. becoming the world’s biggest battery producer, given that China already has such a dominant advantage.)

Perhaps rosiest of all was the bank’s view of major risks to the IRA. The bill passed with not even a single Republican vote, but the bank concludes that the GOP is relatively unlikely to repeal the law, even if they take the White House in 2024. That’s because it would hurt their own voters most: “Republican-leaning states are likely to see the most investment, job, and economic benefits from the IRA,” the report claims. Instead, the IRA is most likely to stumble because America still struggles with building out its energy infrastructure: The country might not be able to get government approval to permit enough power lines, green infrastructure, and carbon-injection wells for the law to matter, the bank said. This risk is all the more heightened now that Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting-reform bill—which, for all its flaws, would have clearly allowed for more renewable transmission construction—has failed. Powerful business groups are also lobbying to revise the most transmission-friendly sections from that bill if Congress revisits it.

The Credit Suisse report is truly remarkable. What stuck with me most was this declaration: For big corporations, the IRA “definitively changes the narrative from risk mitigation to opportunity capture.” In other words, companies should no longer worry that they might be unprepared for future climate regulation, such as a carbon tax. They should be scared of missing out on the economic growth that the energy transition (and the IRA) will bring about.

If the bill’s passage wasn’t signal enough, the report shows that climate change as a political issue—and frankly environmental protection more broadly—has arrived to a wholly new place. For decades, the country’s biggest climate advocates have tried to reduce the harm that the economy causes to the environment. Now they find themselves tasked with the biggest story in the economy itself.

Perhaps most strange, even if the United States slips into recession in the next year, the IRA will only become more important. Historically, economists and businesses have treated helping the environment as a product of prosperity—if the economy is good, then companies can afford to do the right thing. But the IRA’s programs and incentives will keep flowing no matter the macro environment, which makes betting on clean energy one of the most certain economic trends of the next few years. Clean energy is now the safe, smart, government-backed bet for conservative investors. It’s really a shocking reversal of the past 40 years. It is such a change that it hasn’t yet been metabolized by the world of people involved in the issue.

So inspired by the vigor of Credit Suisse’s forecast, let me venture a few predictions of my own. The number of Americans working in a climate-relevant industry is going to explode. It is going to undergo what you might call a techification. I was a nerd and a dreamer in high school in the late aughts, which meant I paid attention to the start-ups of that era—such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr—in their early years. I remember that fateful moment around 2010 when the valence of the industry switched—it was right around when The Social Network came out—and working in tech went from being a career choice for dorky optimists to the default career track for many ambitious college students. A similar switch is coming for companies working on climate change: The opportunity will be too large, the money too persuasive, the problems too intriguing.

Finally, those of us who have long worked in climate change—and here I include myself, who started covering this topic in 2015—should have some excitement and even humility about this deluge of new talent. Even setting its arduous politics aside, managing climate change is a legitimately difficult technical and cultural problem—it’s going to require as many attentive and enthusiastic brains as possible, and the path to decarbonizing always required an infusion of new workers, investment, and good will. If you don’t yet work in the industry, but have always cared about climate change as an issue, well, this is your moment to get involved. These companies are going to need engineers, yes, but also programmers, accountants, marketers, HR staff, general counsels—there is space for everyone now.

The fight against climate change is going to change more in the next four years than it has in the past 40. The great story of our lives is just beginning. Welcome aboard.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/inflation-reduction-act-climate-economy/671659/

This 100% solar community endured Hurricane Ian with no loss of power and minimal damage

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN, October 2, 2022

Anthony Grande moved away from Fort Myers three years ago in large part because of the hurricane risk. He has lived in southwest Florida for nearly 19 years, had experienced Hurricanes Charley in 2004 and Irma in 2017 and saw what stronger storms could do to the coast.

Grande told CNN he wanted to find a new home where developers prioritized climate resiliency in a state that is increasingly vulnerable to record-breaking storm surge, catastrophic wind and historic rainfall.

What he found was Babcock Ranch — only 12 miles northeast of Fort Myers, yet seemingly light years away.

Babcock Ranch calls itself “America’s first solar-powered town.” Its nearby solar array — made up of 700,000 individual panels — generates more electricity than the 2,000-home neighborhood uses, in a state where most electricity is generated by burning natural gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel.

The streets in this meticulously planned neighborhood were designed to flood so houses don’t. Native landscaping along roads helps control storm water. Power and internet lines are buried to avoid wind damage. This is all in addition to being built to Florida’s robust building codes.

Some residents, like Grande, installed more solar panels on their roofs and added battery systems as an extra layer of protection from power outages. Many drive electric vehicles, taking full advantage of solar energy in the Sunshine State.

Climate resiliency was built into the fabric of the town with stronger storms in mind.

So when Hurricane Ian came barreling toward southwest Florida this week, it was a true test for the community. The storm obliterated the nearby Fort Myers and Naples areas with record-breaking surge and winds over 100 mph. It knocked out power to more than 2.6 million customers in the state, including 90% of Charlotte County.

But the lights stayed on in Babcock Ranch.

“It certainly exceeded our expectations of a major hurricane,” Grande, 58, told CNN.

The storm uprooted trees and tore shingles from roofs, but other than that Grande said there is no major damage. Its residents say Babcock Ranch is proof that an eco-conscious and solar-powered town can withstand the wrath of a near-Category 5 storm.

“We have proof of the case now because [the hurricane] came right over us,” Nancy Chorpenning, a 68-year-old Babcock Ranch resident, told CNN. “We have water, electricity, internet — and we may be the only people in Southwest Florida who are that fortunate.”

Grande said Hurricane Ian came through southwest Florida “like a freight train.” But he wasn’t afraid that he would lose everything in a storm, like he was when he lived in Fort Myers.

“We’re very, very blessed and fortunate to not be experiencing what they’re experiencing now in Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach,” Grande said. “In the times that we’re living in right now with climate change, the beach is not the place to live or have a business.”

Syd Kitson, a former professional football player for the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, is the mastermind behind Babcock Ranch. Kitson envisioned it to be an eco-conscious and innovative neighborhood that is safe and resilient from storms like Ian.

The ranch broke ground in 2015 with the construction of the solar array — which was built and is run by Florida Power and Light — and its first residents moved into the town in 2018. Since then, the array has doubled in size and thousands of people have made Babcock their home.

“It’s a great case study to show that it can be done right, if you build in the right place and do it the right way,” said Lisa Hall, a spokesperson for Kitson, who also lives in Babcock Ranch.

“Throughout all this, there’s just so many people saying, ‘it worked, that this was the vision, this is the reason we moved here,’” Hall told CNN.

Perhaps the highest endorsement for the city is that it is now a refuge for some of Ian’s hardest-hit victims. The state opened Babcock Neighborhood School as an official shelter, even though it didn’t have the mandated generator. The solar array kept the lights on.

Some of Chorpenning’s friends who live on Sanibel Island — which is now cut off from the mainland after Ian’s devastating storm surge severed the causeway — came to shelter at a friend’s house at Babcock Ranch. It will be a while before they can go back, she said.

“They’re going to be renting a place over here for a while, while they figure out what’s going to happen out there,” she said. “I joked that we may be the only people in southwest Florida whose property value just increased.”

Even Kitson chose to ride out the storm in Babcock to see how the community would fare in the hurricane. Kitson declined CNN’s request for an interview; Hall said he is focused on helping neighboring communities rebuild.

“He was there during the storm; he said, ‘where else would I be?’” Hall said. “We built it to be resilient and as much as you plan and think you’ve done the right thing, you don’t know until you put it to the test.”

As utilities scramble to restore power across the state, Babcock residents say September storms showed that America’s energy infrastructure is not well-equipped to handle worsening extreme weather events. Hurricane Fiona ravaged Puerto Rico’s power grid when it made landfall there on September 18. Now, Ian has left millions of people in the dark in Florida.

Babcock residents say their neighborhood is a model for urban development in a climate change-ravaged future.

“It’s not what it was 20 or 25 years ago; the storms are getting bigger and bigger, and it’s no surprise, because the warnings have all been there,” Grande said. “I think Babcock Ranch’s future has gotten even brighter.”

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/us/solar-babcock-ranch-florida-hurricane-ian-climate/index.html

Billions in Climate Deal Funding Could Help Protect U.S. Coastal Cities

Communities across the country hope to tap into funds from Democrats’ new climate law to restore coastal habitats, part of a program that emphasizes nature-based solutions.

By Stephanie Lai, The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2022

NEWPORT BAY, Calif. — Claire Arre, a marine biologist, waded through the sand in search of an Olympia oyster on a recent sunny afternoon, monitoring the bed her organization had built to clean up the surrounding watershed and contemplating all that could be done if she could get her hands on federal funding to expand the work.

Ms. Arre’s project aims to combat climate change using nature instead of human-engineered construction, and it is one of many across the nation’s 254 coastal counties that is eligible for billions in federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the sprawling climate, health care and tax bill signed last month by President Biden.

The measure could “have a direct result in getting our next restoration project off the ground and sharing the beneficial impacts here into another area,” said Ms. Arre, the director of marine restoration for Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit group, as she meticulously scanned the site, surrounded by sandbars and cliffs, pickleweed and docked boats.

The group hopes to expand to nearby Huntington Harbour, and it has been seeking funding to do so.

A little-noticed section of Democrats’ climate legislation, which made the largest federal investment in history to combat the warming of the planet, injects $2.6 billion over five years into coastal communities across the country through grants to fund projects that prepare and respond to hazardous climate-related events and disturbances. The program makes up less than 1 percent of the total climate investment in the law, but it is widely regarded as a significant step and the latest sign of a shift by the federal government toward funding nature-based climate solutions.

Officials from coast to coast have long sought funding to restore natural habitats that are essential to beach communities, as floods wreak havoc in the East and rising sea levels increasingly threaten the West. By 2050, sea levels are expected to rise by a foot or more on average, increasing as much in that time as they have in the past century.

Scientists expect the impact of climate change to be far more damaging in the future. Rising sea levels have been exacerbated by flooding and cataclysmic rainstorms, called “megastorms,” that could upend San Francisco and cities across the globe. Along the East Coast, sea-level rise and flooding from rainfall have been threatening cities in Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, among others. Cities are facing a number of obstacles like repairing destroyed roads and drains or retreating inland. And paying for such measures presents yet another challenge.

“Our coastal areas are shrinking before our very eyes, and people are being displaced,” said Representative Troy Carter, Democrat of Louisiana, whose home state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coast — roughly the size of Delaware — since the 1930s. The coastal restoration funding “is a grand-slam home run,” he said.

Escalating climate threats have prompted a continuing debate among policymakers and experts about how best to guard against devastating damage, between those who prioritize building man-made infrastructure like sea walls — sometimes called “gray infrastructure” — and those who favor nature-based solutions, or so-called green infrastructure.

Some scientists and climate organizations see the climate law as a clear signal that the government is giving priority to natural solutions.

“You are seeing a lot more attention and acceptance of greener options,” said Charles Lester, the director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s a spectrum of ways of responding to shoreline change, and this funding is causing us to think more completely and more holistically about all the different pieces of these puzzles.”

Tom Cors, a government relations official at the Nature Conservancy, said the resilience funding in the climate law, in combination with resources in the infrastructure law passed last year, represented the most significant influx of money for green infrastructure, the latest move in a shift that began about a decade ago.

The bipartisan infrastructure measure added $3 billion to the federal pot for projects related to habitat restoration and climate resilience, but funding has yet to be disbursed as the application process is still underway, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Nearly half of it is earmarked for “high-impact natural infrastructure projects.”

And in 2020, Mr. Biden signed legislation that mandated that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the main civil engineering agency of the government that has historically favored gray infrastructure, consider nature-based solutions during an early planning stage of some projects.

The funding from the new climate law will be distributed to NOAA, which is expected to provide funding through contracts, grants and other agreements to local, state and tribal governments, nonprofits and institutions of higher education. The law specified that the money should go to projects that support natural resources in coastal and marine communities, including wetland restoration or restoring sea grass and oyster beds. It also said the funding should be used to protect fisheries and for projects that protect communities from extreme storms and climate change.

Some examples include adding sand or restoring dunes to provide a buffer for the receding shoreline. Wetland restoration also helps absorb storm waters and carbon dioxide — a chemical in the atmosphere known for warming the planet — and contribute to biodiversity. The flow of water can also be slowed by restoring sea grass and oyster beds.

Amy Hutzel, the executive officer for California’s State Coastal Conservancy, the state’s leading nature-based restoration agency, said she was pleased that the climate law focused on nature-based projects, which can reduce the impact of wind and wave patterns along the coast, as opposed to building levees and sea walls.

The moment a city constructs a levee or a sea wall, it “is immediately deteriorating,” Ms. Hutzel said. “When you work with nature, you are building a system that the natural processes are maintaining.”

Some scientists argue that such an approach can be more cost-effective than man-made projects. A New York City study in Queens showed that using gray infrastructure would be twice as expensive as incorporating both gray and green projects.

But nature-based solutions, while attractive, can be difficult to execute, Mr. Lester noted.

Jennifer Brunton, the New York district water business line leader at WSP, an engineering consulting firm, said many of her clients turn away from green infrastructure because they do not have enough space for nature-based solutions and because it is less mainstream.

“They’re hallmark projects,” Ms. Brunton said. “Gray infrastructure is tried and true.”

Gray infrastructure has traditionally been preferred by homeowners along the coast who are willing to part with their beach access if it means creating concrete fixtures that can safeguard their homes, as well as city officials who are skeptical about the effectiveness of green infrastructure. Proponents of gray infrastructure also argue that green projects need constant maintenance, whereas gray infrastructure can be easier to maintain.

In Pacifica, Calif., homeowners like Mark Stechbart, a retiree, have been calling for more gray infrastructure to offset the sea-level rise that is threatening their properties. The coastline in his Northern California community does not have the right conditions for green infrastructure, Mr. Stechbart said, leaving the city with two options: go gray or go inland.

“Gray infrastructure, at least around here, is the only thing that works,” Mr. Stechbart said in an interview. “Either we have a town that functions or we don’t.”

He added, “There are some areas where if you don’t maintain and improve shoreline protections, a major hotel goes in the water.”

Lawmakers in both parties have embraced nature-based infrastructure initiatives, though Republicans opposed the climate law en masse.

“Investing in natural infrastructure projects will better protect coastal communities while restoring habitat and stimulating local economic development,” Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, said in a statement.

Representative Michelle Steel, Republican of California, has supported nature-based resiliency projects in her district, such as adding sand to Huntington Beach. In a statement explaining why she voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, Ms. Steel said, “We need to cut federal spending and get costs under control instead of expecting American families to foot the bill for Washington’s spending addiction.”

Representative Garret Graves, Republican of Louisiana, a champion of resilience projects, also voted no. In a written statement, he said he had little confidence that NOAA would be “fair or transparent” when allocating the funding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/us/politics/climate-law-coastal-projects.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare