The Democrats finally come clean on gas

It's a decade late, but far better than never

Late this afternoon Politico, and then the New York Times, reported that the Department of Energy is ready to release the report of it’s nearly year-long study on LNG exports—a study mandated by a large-scale campaign (that very much included this newsletter) which persuaded President Biden to halt new permits for new terminals along the Gulf of Mexico.

The report, and the equally important statement that came with it, won’t necessarily bind anything—it may complicate somewhat the Trump administration’s plans to approve new export terminals, but probably not fatally. But it does something almost as important. Finally a Democratic administration has been straightforward and honest about natural gas. That may actually matter, both in the short and long-term.

The background here is that, ever since the onset of fracking in the ‘oughts, Democrats have embraced the surge in natural gas. The GOP was still in love with coal, but climate change concerns were making that uncomfortable for anyone this side of Joe Manchin (D-Flammable Black Rocks). Along came the sudden surge in natural gas, which allowed the Obama administration both a path towards reviving the post-financial-crisis economy, and a way to cut carbon emissions. If you doubt me, read almost any of Obama’s State of the Union addresses, which each contain a paragraph-long paean to the fracking boom.

In 2013, for instance, he enthused:

We produce more natural gas than ever before -- and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it. And over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen…

The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. And that’s why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.

The shift from coal to gas-fired power plants, which was basically the sum of Obama’s climate policy, dropped carbon emissions, something he (and the fossil fuel industry) boasted about endlessly. But the problem was physics: as Cornell professor Bob Howarth started noisily pointing out, carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas. CH4, or methane, traps heat even more effectively, and Howarth and others insisted it was escaping into the atmosphere from fracking fields and pipelines in large enough quantity to cancel out the progress on carbon.

They won the scientific battle—study after study has now demonstrated that indeed leak rates are very high. But the political struggle was much harder: no one wanted to give up the idea that there was a pain-free way out of the climate dilemma.

There was so much natural gas in the Permian Basin that America couldn’t soak it up, and in the Trump years we started to export it—that quickly grew to the point where America was the largest source of gas in the world. Both the Biden and Trump administrations approved one export terminal after another, over the outcry of local residents along the Louisiana and Texas coasts who had to deal with these monstrosities. It finally reached the point where environmentalists had to make a stand, and that’s what happened in the fall of 2023—after another Howarth study, this one demonstrating that so much methane leaked from the giant LNG carriers that it was worse than exporting coal.

Hence the pause, and hence the angry outcry from the oil industry (which worked harder than ever to elect a Republican in November), and hence today’s report. The language is truly strong: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, in her letter that accompanies the report, stresses that it would be bad news for American consumers who still depend on gas (supply and demand being what it is). But the more important part is what she says about natural gas and climate. According to the Times, she says that any few facilities should face “rigorous question”

“especially in a world that needs to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Under a scenario in which more than the current level of gas exports was approved, the report finds that the additional emissions would be 1.5 gigatons per year by 2050. That’s about a quarter of annual emissions generated by the United States, the world’s second-biggest polluter.

The fossil fuel industry always insists that LNG exports will replace coal, but crucially Granholm and the report made clear that’s not true.

She noted that the study found increased L.N.G. exports would displace more wind, solar and other renewable energy than coal. The study modeled five scenarios and in every one, global greenhouse gases were projected to rise, even when researchers assumed aggressive use of technologies to capture and store carbon emissions.

This, in turn, sends a signal to Malaysia and Vietnam and the other Asian countries that would be the main recipients of gas from new terminals. I am guardedly hopeful that the year’s delay—which allowed solar and windpower to drop in price and gain in momentum—may be enough to convince those nations that they don’t want to sign up for forty years of dependency on imported gas. I sure hope so, in part because of the heroes that led this fight—people like Roishetta Ozane who are defending not just the whole planet but their particular part of it.

The continued growth of gas exports was “neither sustainable nor advisable,” Granholm said. That’s the closest that prominent American politicians have come to telling the truth about the most important component of the climate crisis. If Kamala Harris had won the election, this might have meant a real sea-change. In our current reality it’s at least honest, and honesty is a lot better than its opposite.

In other energy and climate news:

+Fascinating account from Bloomberg of how—if Trump proceeds to gut NOAA as promised—China is going to end up running the world’s weather-sensing systems. It’s part of a broader picture that I’ll keep looking at the next years spin out: I think there’s a real chance that our political immaturity (“it’s a hoax!”) may be the start of our global political irrelevance. If climate change is the biggest single issue in the world, and one of the two superpowers is taking it seriously…. Anyway, the weather:

Beijing is clear it sees climate science as a geopolitical battleground. President Xi Jinping has said he wants China to become a “weather superpower,” and made it a national priority to win the world’s second-largest economy a bigger say in global meteorological governance. To that end, the country boosted spending on climate diplomacy by nearly 500% from 2013 to 2023, following a tried-and-tested playbook of offering other nations financial help and support to boost usage of Chinese technology and services.

China’s play for weather dominance comes as NOAA faces an uncertain future under the incoming Trump administration. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy roadmap says NOAA should be “broken up and downsized.” It calls for much of the agency’s climate research to be “disbanded” and for weather forecasting to be completely privatized. Some former NOAA officials worry those plans will be a blueprint for weakening the agency, especially as Trump taps authors of the manifesto for influential cabinet roles.

The damage won’t be confined to politics either. GM just took a $5 billion blow to its business because it can’t figure out how to compete in China, where people want—who’da thunk it?—cheap but tricked-out electric cars

G.M.’s troubles in China, the world’s largest vehicle market, reflect a broader trend. Almost all foreign automakers there, including European, Japanese and South Korean companies, are struggling as increasingly ambitious Chinese car companies like BYD and Geely introduce new models and slash prices. Many of those automakers are also exporting a growing number of cars to other countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Ford Motor has been working to streamline and reorganize its Chinese joint venture for several years. The automaker spent $881 million restructuring the business in the first nine months of the year.

Americans would probably like some of those Chinese cars too—hence the tariff walls that Biden constructed. Defending Detroit from foreign competition while it geared up to electrify makes sense—but that defense can’t last forever. And Trump seems to want to build that economic wall and then abandon the project of electrification, which makes no sense at all. It may not happen, though. According to E&E News, the auto industry is mobilizing to convince Republican members of Congress not to kill EV credits

In the October letter obtained by POLITICO on Wednesday, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation — which represents industry giants including Ford, GM, Stellantis, Honda and Toyota — argued that incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act build on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to maintain a “globally competitive American auto industry” amid China’s growing dominance of the market.

“Sustaining these complementary provisions — including the Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit, consumer tax credit and commercial leasing credit — is critical to cementing the U.S. as a global leader in the future of automotive technology and manufacturing,” David Schwietert, the group’s chief government affairs and policy officer, wrote in the letter.

Oh, and in the healthy rivalry department, Colorado governor Jared Polis claims his state has surpassed California for the highest percentage of electric vehicles, with EVs topping a quarter of sales in the third quarter. It’s the first time California has ever lost this particular crown.

By analyzing national vehicle sales figures, the consortium found EVs accounted for 25.3 percent of new cars sold or leased in Colorado in the third quarter of 2024. California, by comparison, reported a 24.3 percent EV market share over the same period.

The small difference means Colorado has overtaken the Golden State, which has spent years setting the pace for EV adoption nationwide. The states with the next largest EV market share are Washington, Nevada, Oregon and New Jersey.

+Lots of great news, big and small, from the solar energy world today, beginning with the news that America both built and deployed record numbers of solar panels this year.

In Oregon, the state has approved what will be one of the largest solar farms in the country, across 10,000 acres in Morrow County. It will supply the electricity for…800,000 homes.

The energy company plans to begin construction in 2026 and will invest over $1,000 per acre to support local agriculture. This initiative will contribute approximately $11 million to a fund aimed at benefiting the region’s wheat farmers, while enhancing the long-term sustainability of Morrow County’s wheat farms.

Ken Grieb, a local wheat farmer and landowner involved in the project, is hopeful about its potential to bring economic benefits to Morrow County. Pine Gate’s collaborative approach to energy development shows a commitment to the community, he notes. “Pine Gate has demonstrated how large energy facility development can be done thoughtfully and collaboratively,” Grieb said.

Sunstone Solar will connect to the grid through the Bonneville Power Administration via the Umatilla Electric Cooperative system, with engineering and procurement starting in early 2025 and phased construction expected to begin in 2026.

In Georgia, solar panels are going up at a record pace

The Peach State added 1,376 megawatts of solar in the first three quarters of this year, enough to power roughly 160,000 homes, according to the new analysis from the Solar Energy Industries Association and the data analytics firm Wood Mackenzie. That’s the fifth most in the country, trailing only Texas, Florida, California and Nevada, the report found.

On the manufacturing side, Georgia is also near the top.

With Qcells’ second factory now churning out finished panels in North Georgia, the state ranked second for solar module production through the first three quarters of 2024, according to the report. The $2.5 billion investment the company is making to expand its Georgia manufacturing footprint is expected to boost its workforce in the state to 4,000 full-time employees.

It’s a mark of the topsy-turvy nature of American politics that, with IRA money, the largest solar panel factory in the country is now in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. I saw Ben Jealous, the head of the Sierra Club, this week, and he was reporting on a recent visit to the plant, which was papered with drawings from the children of employees, part of an Earth Day poster contest that showed their parents as environmental heroes. Go figure!

And just because I liked it, here’s a story about a Pennsylvania church cutting the ribbon on its rooftop solar array, which will supply all the electricity the congregation can use

But if you really want your mind joyfully blown, read this NPR account of a Boston hospital that covered its roof with solar panels, so that its doctors could write prescriptions for lower-cost clean electricity to patients who relied on, say, air-conditioning to deal with health problems.

Kiki Polk was among the first recipients. She has a history of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

On a warm fall day, Polk, who was nine months pregnant at the time, leaned into the air conditioning window unit in her living room.

"Oh my gosh, this feels so good baby," Polk crooned, swaying back and forth. "This is my best friend and my worst enemy."

An enemy, because Polk can't afford to run the AC. On cooler days, she uses a fan or opens a window instead. Polk knows the risks of overheating during pregnancy, including added stress on the pregnant person's heart and potential risks to the fetus. She also has a teenage daughter who uses the AC in her bedroom — too much, according to her mom.

Polk got behind on her utility bill. Eversource, her electricity provider, worked with her on a payment plan. But the bills were still high for Polk, who works as a school bus and lunchroom monitor. She was surprised when staff at Boston Medical Center, where she was a patient, offered to help.

+A fascinating and scary new study in Nature shows that the number of people killed directly by hurricanes is dwarfed by the number who die in the years that follow

Why?

We propose five hypotheses that might explain why tropical cyclones (TCs) trigger excess mortality. (1) Economic disruption from TCs might change household economic decisions, eventually translating into adverse health outcomes². (1) For example, job loss might affect health insurance, or retirement savings could be drawn down to repair property damage, both of which could reduce future spending on healthcare. (2) Social network changes after TCs could affect future health. For example, out-migration of working-age individuals could alter social support for older dependents that remain behind. (3) Fiscal adjustments by state or local governments in response to TCs may impact future health outcomes. For example, restructuring budgets to support recovery might reduce spending on healthcare infrastructure. (4) Changes in the natural environment after TCs could impact health. For example, ecological changes could redistribute disease vectors or flooding may expose populations to harmful chemicals. (5) Heightened physical and mental stress from experiencing TCs may alter long-run health. Future work that determines whether these or other channels generate post-TC mortality will enable the development of effective policy interventions.

+Lots and lots of analysis (some of it conflicting) about how the climate movement should proceed during the Trump years. In the New Republic, Nick Tabor argues that state legislatures will be the key:

“States are where it’s at,” said Bethany Davis Noll, the executive director of the State and Environmental Impact Center at NYU’s law school. “We don’t get anything out of the federal government until states start agitating. They’re the ones who are more in touch with what you and I really want.”

Nathaniel Stinnett, of the Environmental Voter Project, says pick up the pace of campaigning:

We must reframe how we tell the story of the climate crisis, we must focus more on voters than on politicians, and we must campaign year-round at every level of government.

Countless scientific studies show that humans are hardwired to tell stories. We have evolved to use narrative as a survival technique — like other animals use camouflage or echolocation — and our stories give us the power to cooperate and solve enormously complex problems.

When we adopt the role of protagonist, name a villain with evil motives, and then collectively strive towards a common goal, we can cure diseases and win world wars. Yet the climate movement hasn’t created a narrative like this to maximize our cooperative power, largely because the fossil fuel industry beat us to it.

Meanwhile, former Wall Street Journal columnist Liam Denning argues that Democrats need to rebrand climate action as a “renewal of the U.S. power grid.”

The myriad paths to net-zero all run through mass electrification. Electrical energy is more efficient than thermal energy and, crucially, the grid can be decarbonized over time. Emphasizing electricity-enabled jobs and/or investment, rather than just green energy jobs in and of themselves, would represent a subtle but meaningful reframing of climate policy as the path to efficient, cheaper — and sustainable — energy, and the economic possibilities flowing from that.

And the final word to the indefatigable and brilliant Leah Stokes, who Betsy Kolbert interviews for Yale’s Environment 360. Stokes played a key role in writing the Inflation Reduction Act and she predicts it will have staying power

I believe that corporate lobbying is going to keep a lot of the law in place. I really believe that. The things that will be on the table are largely [clean energy] tax credits, because the grants will be mostly out the door by the time the Biden administration wraps up at the beginning of January. These tax credits are benefiting companies, and you’re already seeing the reporting that for even the most vulnerable tax credits, which I would assume are the EV tax credits, there’s a constituency out there trying to defend those. Companies have made investments that take years to really come to fruition, and they can’t really turn around on a dime.

And when you think about all the manufacturing investments that are in these Republican districts, it’s not just the manufacturing jobs that matter. You start to realize that all those investments in making stuff in America, they want to sell that stuff in America too. And in order to sell that stuff in America, they need the other tax credits for deployment. So that’s where you start to have the tech-neutral tax credit for clean power, the home energy efficiency tax credit, the home solar tax credit, the EV tax credit and so on.

Oh, and the veteran environmental leader Dana Beach has some food for thought for his fellow South Carolinian, Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent, who is pledging to increase oil production by three percent

Charleston, where Mr. Bessent lives, has experienced a 400% increase in “sunny day flooding” over the past 20 years due to rising sea levels. The projected cost of flood mitigation here is several billion dollars. Other coastal cities are confronting similar climate-related challenges, from Miami to Norfolk to New York.

As a macro-investor, Mr. Bessent should be familiar with the decades of research on climate change. A Nov. 6 Scientific American posting states, “It is ‘virtually certain’ that 2024 will be the first year to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in the preindustrial era, before heat-trapping fossil fuels began accumulating in the atmosphere. … Thousands of climate studies have shown that the more — and faster — the world can bring emissions down to zero, the more humanity can avoid the harmful impacts of warming, such as harsher and more frequent heat waves, larger destructive floods, and crop damage that can drive up food prices.” The urgency of stabilizing the climate runs precisely counter to Mr. Bessent’s triple-3 slogan for the economy.

Fortunately, there are extensive opportunities in the clean energy sector that are practical and politically viable. Like many states, South Carolina has no petroleum reserves. We have, however, made substantial economic progress in clean energy, with major investments in the fields of battery recycling, solar panel production and, perhaps most notably, in manufacturing hybrid and electric-powered automobiles — namely Volvo in the Lowcountry, Scout Motors in the Midlands and BMW in the Upstate. Collectively, these companies employ tens of thousands of workers and represent several billion dollars in capital investment.

+Carbon offsets really are a scam. A new paper found that “less than 16% of the carbon credits issued to the investigated projects constitute real emission reductions.”

+Electric cars, on the other hand, turn out to be better than advertised. Writing in Wired, James Norris reports

Consulting firm P3 recently analyzed 7,000 fleet electric vehicles, in partnership with Austrian battery testing specialist Aviloo. Their report showed that, on average, EV batteries have 90 percent capacity after 100,000 kilometers of driving, and at 300,000 kilometers they still have 87 percent of their original kilowatts left.

+An important landmark in the UK, where (with the vigorous work of the group People and Planet) three-quarters of universities have now divested from fossil fuels

“That we can celebrate this today is down to the generations of students and staff that have fought for justice in solidarity with impacted communities. The days of UK universities profiteering from investments in this neo-colonial industry are over.”

People & Planet set up the Fossil Free universities campaign in 2013. As part of its efforts the group has highlighted the “struggles and voices” of communities on the frontline of the climate crisis in an attempt to bring home the real-world impact of investment decisions made by UK universities.

LauClayson said: “The demand for fossil-free came from frontline communities themselves and it is an act of solidarity from global north organisers campaigning on this … We have a responsibility to speak the lived experiences of the communities resisting these inequalities into megaphones at protests and in negotiations within university boardrooms, to highlight their stories of struggle in spaces so often detached from the reality of everyday life on the frontlines.”

Not to mention the Episcopal church!

+Movie night at the newsletter! Here’s a film about John Francis, a remarkable man who walked much of the planet

Meanwhile, Gary Houser has something much more specific in mind: how the climate movement can learn from the successes of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s—particularly the success of the film The Day After

Oh, and here’s a nifty little video about the Rocking Chair Rebellion that we’ve been fomenting at Third Act!