Elections Matter--and not just here

A decision by Britain's new labor government may leave an entire oil field untouched

I’m pretty sure this newsletter will be obsessing over the American election between now and November—it is the most crucial contest in the crucial years, after all. But this has already been a year of democracy around the globe with half the world’s people going to the polls, and the results have so far been not as bad as they might have been—Modi rebuked in India, the far right checked in European elections and in France, and a smashing victory for Labour in the UK which is already yielding serious climate benefits.

Yesterday Ed Milliband, the new Labour Energy Secretary, yesterday announced that the government would not back the companies that want to develop two huge new North Sea oilfields. This takes a bit of explanation, so bear with me. Oil giants Shell and Equinor want to develop the vast Jackdaw and Rosebank oil fields. The Tory government backed these projects, even though it led former energy secretary Chris Skidmore to resign from the party. In June, a court ruled that the environmental review for the projects was insufficient, because, crucially, the companies had failed to account for the emissions not just from the oil wells themselves, but from the eventual combustion of that oil in cars around the world. These so-called Scope 3 emissions are obviously the key problem with new gas and oil projects, but the industry has worked hard to keep them off the table—and after the court ruling the then-Tory government announced they would back those companies in court. Now the new sheriff, veteran environmentalist Milliband, has said no.

The fight isn’t over—the companies are appealing the court rulings. But here’s my prediction: this will be one of the first large oilfields that humans decide to leave in the ground because of climate concerns.

I say this because Labour has just won its massive majority, and can now govern for as much as five years before they have to face the voters again. Let’s say they don’t call a new election along the way and govern until 2029; with the massive growth in renewable energy now firmly underway, I don’t think that there will be the appetite among financiers for new oil fields then. They’ll certainly try—as Desmog Blog points out today, a leading candidate for the new head of the beleaguered Tory party, Tom Tugendhat, has been merrily collecting money from various oil interests and is plumping for new North Sea drilling. But I think that by the time he or someone likes him returns to 10 Downing Street, the moment will have passed.

Here’s how the Tory MP for East Surrey and shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho put it on Twitter this morning

The final blow for the North Sea. No other major economy is taking this approach to its domestic energy supply.

She’s right that it’s groundbreaking, but she’s wrong that it’s entirely novel. Yes, too many rich countries continue to pump out hydrocarbons for export—tiny Tuvalu called out its Pacific neighbor Australia today for its endless willingness to serve as coal and gas merchant to the world. But there are signs of seismic shift. Remember that last fall in Dubai the world’s governments agreed in Dubai that the time had come to “transition away” from fossil fuels. A few weeks later the Biden administration paused approval of new LNG export terminals, which if it became permanent would in effect keep some serious portion of the gas in the Permian Basin of the southwest permanently underground. That is an even bigger climate bomb than North Sea oil, and though the pushback from fossil fuel interests has been fierce the White House has so far kept its nerve—and the basic issue (along with the ferocious justice impacts on Gulf communities) is the same Scope 3 emissions. It’s just too much carbon and methane to let loose in the atmosphere.

I fear that America’s noble stand may not last. In the wake of the Harris victory I’m working hard to help achieve, I think a lame duck session of Congress might well adopt the proposal from Big Oil Senators Manchin and Barasso to trade permitting reform that will help expand renewables with new permits for those LNG facilities. I hope they don’t; important as those permitting reforms are, this one is a bad deal, as a new Sierra Club report released today makes clear

The LNG projects that would likely be immediately subject to the 90 day review deadline if this bill passes would have climate-damaging emissions equivalent to 154 coal-fired power plants. For comparison, as of August 2024, there are 145 coal plants left in the entire US that don’t have a retirement date by 2030. When looking at all the projects that DOE is likely to review in the coming years, the climate toll goes up to that of 422 coal plants.

There are, again, two equally important and interlinked parts of the climate fight: keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and building out renewable energy to replace that locked-away coal, gas and oil. And the fight is unavoidably global.

So much energy and climate news:

+One of the most important essays on U.S. climate policy in a long while emerged in the pages of Foreign Policy this week. It’s important because of its source—Brian Deese, who was Biden’s chief economic advisor for the consequential chunk of his presidency and a key negotiator of the climate bill (he’s now serving as an advisor to Harris). And it’s important for its ambitious content, which is nothing less than the recreation of the Marshall Plan to spread clean energy around the world

The clean energy transition remains the most important planetary challenge. It also presents the greatest economic opportunity: it will be the largest capital formation event in human history. And it presents the United States with a chance to lead. Thanks to its still unparalleled power and influence, Washington maintains a unique capacity—and a strategic imperative—to shape world outcomes.

In 2022, the United States recognized these opportunities when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the world’s largest-ever investment in clean energy technologies. This transformative industrial strategy was a crucial first step for the United States in positioning its economy for success by accelerating the clean energy transition at home. Now is the time to take this leadership to the global stage, in a way that promotes U.S. interests and supports aligned countries. But the United States need not create a new model for doing so…

Just as the Marshall Plan assisted those countries most ravaged by World War II, the new Marshall Plan should aim to help countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: the United States’ partners in the developing world. Developing countries and emerging markets will need access to cheap capital and technology to transition away from fossil fuels quickly enough to halt global warming.

The United States again has the chance to help others while helping itself. Putting its own burgeoning industries front and center in the energy transition will generate further innovation and growth. Clean energy investment in the United States reached about 7.4 percent of private fixed investment in structures and equipment in the first quarter of this year, at $40 billion, up from $16 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Investment in emerging energy technologies—such as hydrogen power and carbon capture and storage—jumped by 1,000 percent from 2022 to 2023. Manufacturing investment in the battery supply chain went up nearly 200 percent over the same period. By creating global markets for its own clean energy industries and innovators, the United States can scale these economic gains and strengthen domestic support for an energy shift that has not always been an easy sell to voters.

The fracturing world order and the ominous climate crisis lead some observers to focus on the potential tensions between those two developments. But they also provide an opening for the United States to deploy its innovation and capital in a generous, pragmatic, and unapologetically pro-American way—by launching a Clean Energy Marshall Plan.

+Another widely read essay, this one from Holly Jean Buck in Jacobin, argues that the climate movement should spend less time worrying about oil energy disinformation and more time “explaining to people what heat pumps are, campaigning to expedite transmission lines, and helping communities understand the labyrinth of federal funding.” This, she argues, would help a lot because

when people ask questions about the viability of climate action, it’s often because they work in logistics, agriculture, or manufacturing, and they understand — often in ways office workers like me don’t — the complexity of building out new systems. Their skepticism about some of the climate policy responses being proposed stems from their experience with systems and infrastructure as well as from their observations of how industries have behaved in the past. It’s not that they are being programmed by a fossil-fueled conspiracy.

It strikes me as reasonable that we should keep doing this work (hence, say, this newsletter’s endless focus on the glories and intricacies of heat pumps), but that we should also continue to point out that Big Oil is in fact trying to stop progress. I thought Aaron Regunberg’s rejoinder in the same publication

There are so many examples like those I’ve experienced of how climate disinformation is — in real, concrete, practical terms — helping the oil and gas industry block and delay what Buck describes as “the actual work of climate action, which, at the end of the day, is remaking physical systems to replace the 80 percent of fossil energy that now powers our lives with clean energy.” That’s why the climate movement’s focus on combating this disinformation is so urgent and essential.

Oil and gas companies are not sending representatives to people’s homes saying, “Wind turbines kill whales, trust us” — they’re supporting the creation of a whole network of front groups to deliver that messaging in much more organic ways. They’re not only funding ads to gin up a gas stove culture war — they’re also paying popular social media influencers to do that dirty work for them. And they aren’t just producing materials on their corporate letterheads falsely claiming fracked gas lowers carbon emissions — they’re funding programs and researchers at elite universities to launder these claims through prestigious academic institutions and scientific journals.

+A new NASA study finds that we could push past the 2 degree Celsius mark sometime between 2041 and 2044 (i.e., in less than two decades) and that this will be…bad. They looked in particular at the Amazon

The NASA study also shined a spotlight on the Amazon, which projections say could experience, not only higher temperatures, but also less rain, more severe drought, more winds and a greater risk of fire incidents. The Amazon could be the area on the planet with the greatest reduction in relative humidity, especially in the so-called Arc of Deforestation — a crescent-shaped zone of extensive human-caused rainforest loss stretching from Brazil’s Atlantic coast to its western border with Bolivia.

As a result, that region “could experience one of the most significant climate changes on Earth,” said one expert. Those extremes could even trigger the overshoot of a tipping point, with the Amazon Rainforest transitioning rapidly to degraded savanna — adding massive amounts of stored carbon to the atmosphere, drastically worsening climate change.

+The ever-vigilant Kenneth Pucker, writing in the Harvard Business Review, finds that companies are scaling back diversity and sustainability pledges under pressure from conservative activists. (Ford and Lowe’s have joined the list in recent days). He calls it shortsighted, pointing out

Over time, the balance of negative- and positive-return sustainability investments will shift. As the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, pricing of carbon will become even more common. Already, starting in 2026, the newly enacted European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), a tariff, will put a price on the embodied carbon for several key heavy industry inputs including steel, aluminum, iron, and cement entering the EU. As a result, many investments that may not pay out today will be accretive in the future.

To prepare for truer pricing of carbon, companies ought to set an internal carbon price with proceeds used to fund investments to lower emissions. Carbon prices are already in place in more than 20% of U.S. and EU companies. Danone, for example, started with an internal carbon price of €35 and Klarna recently doubled its price for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions to $200 per metric. Also, given that 90% of public equity value is comprised of intangible assets (such as a company’s brand and intellectual property), several companies adjust cash flows or the corporate hurdle rate to advantage sustainability investments. Though imprecise, so doing attempts to account for the increasingly important value of intangible assets.

Like working with suppliers, making these adjustments demands an orientation that balances short- and medium-term results. This is because these financial tactics spur companies to accelerate the costs (e.g., of regulation) and risks (e.g., to brand reputation) of environmental degradation by replacing the mispriced incentives of the market with clearer signals to advance sustainability. Courageous executives will realize, however, that so doing is in fact in keeping with how investors value companies — based on future cash flows, not each 90-day earnings cycle.

+ Curious about solar geoengineering? A new model from an AI pioneer lets you play around with different schemes. (But remember that playing with AI burns energy!)

+Veteran PR practitioner David Fenton wishes the Democratic convention had spent a little more time talking about climate

Vice President Kamala Harris devoted barely seven words to the issue. President Biden briefly touted his Inflation Reduction Act without explaining that climate change threatens global security, prosperity and health. Former President Obama mentioned it in one throwaway line. Michelle Obama didn’t mention it at all. Tim Walz, Oprah and so many others were silent on the issue of the very survival of our civilization. 

Of course, at the Republican Convention energy was mentioned frequently — they want to drill for more of the polluting kind. The intensified global heating and destruction this will cause was mentioned, too – in mockery. So one party used prime time to distort the truth, while the other mostly hid it from the public. 

+Some good news! The effervescent Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has come to Substack, with a new newsletter that echoes the title of her important forthcoming book, “What If We Get It Right?”

+Another important new Substack, from the folks behind the ‘solutionary rail’ concept. Basically this calls for electrifying America’s trains (common in Europe) and using the railroad right of ways as transmission corridors for renewable energy)

In the forefront is the most crucial issue facing humanity, the climate crisis. Railroads have a keystone role in addressing it. They are the fastest route to cut climate pollution from one of its major sources, transportation. Rail is already the most efficient mode to haul freight on land. Moving freight from trucks to rail reduces energy use by three to five  times. Electrifying rail and running it on renewable energy is the quickest track to eliminate climate pollution in long-distance freight and passenger transportation. It allows higher speeds that make trains competitive with air travel in many corridors. 

Reducing diesel pollution by shifting freight from trucks to rail, running rail on electricity, and electrifying trucks for the shorter hauls for which truck electrification is most feasible, saves the health and lives of people living along highways and tracks, and near warehouse districts and railyards. As well, this reduces particulate pollution from tire and brake wear, another significant health hazard. Moving from aviation to passenger rail slashes pollution close to airports. Since communities around all these tend to be lower-income, where many people of color live, railroads offer a key environmental justice solution. 

Railroads are also key to unlocking rapid renewable energy growth, reducing power sector climate pollution. The greatest obstacle to swift expansion is a lack of long distance lines to transmit electricity from remote solar and wind resources to population centers where demand is concentrated.  Transmission can be most quickly added along railroad right-of-ways under single ownerships and with traditional industrial uses, as opposed to multiple parcels where lines are often blocked by local opposition.  

+If you like TED Talks, the redoubtable Saleem Ali lays out a plan for helping countries cooperate, not compete, in the search for the critical minerals required for the energy transition. And if you like podcasts (and who doesn’t?), that polymath J. Doyne Farmer lays out the case for “a new kind of economics that takes account of what we've learned from chaos theory and that builds more accurate models of how humans actually behave.” Farmer is the key voice behind the most important study of solar economics, with an emphasis on the power of learning curves to drop prices.

Oh, and as long as we’re on podcasts, David Roberts over at Volts has good news about the chances for EV chargers along urban streets.

+Folksinger Patti Casey is one of the great bards of the fight for a workable world. Check out her new offering, Stronger Than That

When the storm is rolling in and our hopes start to fade
That’s when we rise as one, our spirits like a blade
We are many, we are mighty, and even when we are afraid
We are stronger than that

+Truly hideous flooding in the Sudan after a dam bursts amidst torrential rains, killing—well, hard to know. A lot of people. And as the great medical writer Laurie Garrett points out, it’s super hot there right now, with a lot of pre-existing refugees, so watch out for cholera. And as I’ll point out, per capita carbon emissions in Sudan are less than 1/50th that of Americans

+South Korea’s high court (where justices serve logical six year terms, I might add) yesterday ruled that the government needed to sharpen its plans for carbon reductions. The contrast with our corrupt court, where lifelong justices take big gifts from oil barons, could not be sharper.

The court found that the absence of legally binding targets for greenhouse gas reductions for the period from 2031-49 violated the constitutional rights of future generations and failed to uphold the government’s duty to protect those rights.

The court said this lack of long-term targets shifted an excessive burden to the future. It gave the national assembly and government until 28 February 2026 to amend the law to include these longer-term targets.

+One more good thing about solar farms is that when terrorists attack them, the damage they can do to the grid is…limited. Which is not to say, what a mess.

+Just saying: indigenous-owned solar boats gliding peacefully through the Amazon.

Also, ever wonder how much it costs to charge an e-bike? About one penny per five miles

+One more truly crucial essay this week, from the great meteorologist/hurricane watcher Jeff Masters, on the topic of when climate change will turn daily life upside down.

The intensifying climate change storm will soon reach a threshold I think of as a category 1 hurricane for humanity — when long-term global warming surpasses 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, a value increasingly characterized over the last decade as “dangerous” climate change.

For humanity as a whole, this amount of warming is risky, but not devastating. Global warming is currently at about 1.2-1.3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and is likely to cross the 1.5-degree threshold in the late 2020s or early 2030s.

Assuming that we don’t work exceptionally hard to reduce emissions in the next 10 years, the world is expected to reach 2 degrees Celsius of warming between 2045 and 2051. In my estimation, that will be akin to a major category 3 hurricane for humanity — devastating, but not catastrophic.

Allowing global warming to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius will cause category 4-level damage to civilization — approaching the catastrophic level. And warming in excess of 3 degrees Celsius will likely be a catastrophic category 5-level superstorm of destruction that will crash civilization.

+Greenpeace, doing its best to fight off a ruinous anti-activism lawsuit from a pipeline company, may have come up with a novel legal tactic

+Rachel Cohen: a powerful essay in Vox arguing that while we fight the system we should volunteer close to home too, in an effort to make change/save our minds

I know firsthand that many Americans are overwhelmed by negative news stories, which compound in exhausting ways. It’s become far too hard to know what’s true, and all the contradictory information leads some to give up trying to make sense of the world altogether. The proportion of readers who say they avoid news is close to an all-time high.

Volunteering wouldn’t solve these problems, but given what we know about volunteering’s benefits, it seems it could certainly help. One University of Oxford researcher surveyed over 45,000 employees whose companies offered wellness benefits like massage classes, coaching sessions, and mindfulness workshops. The only option that seemed to actually have a positive effect on well-being, the study found, were those jobs that provided workers with opportunities for charity or volunteering.

+The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating report on the fast-growing Texas cities that are also brutally hot and essentially out of water.

“We don’t get to choose between moderate or slow growth,” Mitchell said in an interview in the city’s new 64,000-square-foot municipal building. Texas law gives municipalities fewer levers to curb construction than in other states, Mitchell said, so Kyle focuses on attracting developers, then bargaining with them to ensure they build sustainably.

+A new study from Oil Change International makes clear what this newsletter has long maintained: money spent on carbon capture schemes is money wasted. If it was the price to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, so be it—but no more. As Lorne Stockman explains

This report shows that USD 30 billion of public money has been wasted on carbon capture and fossil hydrogen projects that not only fail to deliver results but also delay the necessary transition to renewable energy by propping up the fossil fuel industry. Carbon capture allows fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual when it’s high time for them to be phased out. Governments must redirect their support towards proven, effective solutions to the climate crisis.”

+Always innovative, Texas has a new ‘business court’ stacked with judges who have represented oil and gas interests.

The judge that Abbott selected to head the new appellate court, Scott Brister, has since 2009 worked at a law firm known for its specialty in fossil fuel litigation. While an attorney there, Brister, a Republican, led the defense of the oil company BP in litigation over the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in history, which released more than 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

+And one of the world’s great environmentalists, Pope Francis, is headed out for a four-country Asian tour at age 87 to spread the Gospel, and also the climate gospel.

Francis pushed hard for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and aides say he wants to continue his appeals to confront the dangers of a rapidly warming world, and especially to support the most vulnerable. In the countries on his tour, these dangers include rising sea levels and increasingly severe and unpredictable heat waves and typhoons.

Jakarta, the Indonesian capital where the trip begins, has experienced disastrous flooding in recent years and is slowly sinking, prompting the government to build a new $32-billion capital on Borneo.

Just, thank you!