'Unabated'

A single word can derail climate progress

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has been, for several years now, tied with Greta Thunberg as the most outspoken global leader in his attacks on the fossil fuel industry. (He memorably told oil industry executives, for instance, that “your core product is our core problem.”) And his introductory remarks at COP 28 this weekwere no exception.

“Earth’s vital signs are failing,” said the man with the best mandate to actually speak for the Earth. “Record emissions, ferocious fires, deadly droughts and the hottest year ever.”

But when he got to specifics, Guterres was even more on point. “The science is clear,” he said. “We must accelerate a just, equitable transition to renewables.”

“The 1.5-degree limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels.

Not reduce.

Not abate.

Phaseout – with a clear timeframe aligned with 1.5 degrees”

I want to focus on one word in that litany: “abate.”

What Guterres is trying to head off is the fossil fuel industry scam de jour decade. It’s abundantly clear that coal, oil and gas are breaking the climate system; it’s also abundantly clear that the people who own coal, oil and gas reserves don’t care. In an effort to keep burning them, so they can continue to collect the returns, they propose building vast engineering projects alongside fossil-fuel generating plants, to capture the carbon dioxide from the exhaust stream. That is, they want to “abate” the damage of their product.

It doesn’t really work—one attempt after another has been abandoned, and Stanford’s Mark Jacobson has shown why in a series of seminal papers. As the New York Times explained earlier this year, “after taking into account the energy used to capture and isolate CO2 from flue gas at a fossil fuel-burning industrial plant, the carbon capture system would reduce the plant’s net emissions by only 10 to 11 percent, not the estimated 80 to 90 percent cited by proponents.”

But even if you could physically make it work it would still be absurd, at least on our planet, which in 2023 has figured out how to cheaply capture the power of the sun to produce energy. If coal or gas-fired power is already considerably more expensive than solar energy, imagine what happens to that cost differential if you add an enormous complex of pipes and pumps to take the co2 and pump it off to some abandoned salt mine for storage.

In fact, the cost of doing this is so prohibitive that no coal or oil or gas company or utility wants to pay for it themselves—instead, they use their political power to make taxpayers foot the bill, so they can keep selling their product. In order to secure Joe Manchin’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden had to lard it with billions of dollars in funding for this particular boondoggle.

And now the industry is using COP28 to try and enshrine this escape hatch permanently. Activists have been demanding a fossil fuel phase out, but the power brokers—US climate envoy John Kerry chief among them—have been offering instead a phaseout of “unabated” fossil fuel. In April, as Reuters reported, “the Group of Seven industrialized nations, which includes the United States, agreed to speed up the "phase-out of unabated fossil fuels," and four days ago he repeated the phrase, saying this time he had China on board with the plan. Yesterday he took to X (the '“go fuck yourself” platform) to boast about joining an alliance to phase out “unabated coal use.”

Jeremy Symons, the veteran energy analyst, has an important short essay this week pointing out that this endless sucking up to fossil fuel is enshrined in the whole climate negotiation process, ever since its first iteration at Rio in 1992 when delegates “described ‘fossil fuel production, use and exportation’ as an economic necessity. That unworkable deal has mapped the course of ineffectual climate talks for the past three decades. Lofty climate ambitions could be announced as long as the agreements do not interfere with the fossil fuel industries at the heart of the problem.” As Politico makes clear in a recent essay, Sultan Al-Jaber’s “leadership” of the talks has had no more important backer than Kerry.

One sympathizes with the former Secretary of State, at least to a degree. He’s trying to swing a deal that can include powers like the UAE, the Saudis, and the United States, all places where Big Oil is immensely politically powerful. But the deal’s not worth it if it sets us on a path of pretending we can economically capture the emissions from these fossil fuels. In a rational world—one where political power was not determinative—we’d be spending every penny we had on solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. Because they’re cheap, and because they don’t produce emissions that you then have to pretend you’re capturing.

The point of the COP—the point of all climate efforts—should not be to produce a deal. Let me repeat myself. The point of climate negotiations should not be to produce a deal, no matter how many pixels are spilled about that prospect over the next two weeks. It’s to stop the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And Guterres is right: there’s one way to do that, and it’s renewable energy. Phase out fossil fuels period, and stat.

Everything else is just smoke.

In other energy and climate news:

+The absurd Mountain Valley Pipeline—something else Joe Manchin demanded for his vote on the IRA—is slated to go through the heart of Appalachia, which means among other things that it bisects one of America’s great music belts. Artists from across the region have come together to record an album to raise both money and awareness.

+An entire county school system in…West Virginia is converting to solar power. As the Associated Press explains:

Wayne County’s project represents the largest power purchase agreement ever signed in West Virginia, and is expected to save the school system $6.5 million over the course of the 25-year agreement, according to the developer. In 2021, the GOP-dominated state Legislature passed a law facilitating solar deployment in the historically fossil fuel-dependent state. The law legalized power purchase agreements, which allows entities such as the Wayne County Schools to purchase energy generated by Solar Holler-owned systems without upfront capital investment.

Wayne County Schools Superintendent Todd Alexander said the anticipated financial impact of the project, set to be completed in 2025, is enough to fund the salaries of three additional teachers for the duration of their careers.

“Transitioning to solar power resonates beyond economics — it’s a commitment to nurturing our students and community,” he said in a statement.

The schools are currently powered by American Electric Power, one of the nation’s largest electricity generators. As of 2022, the company depended on coal for 41% of its power generation, compared with 23% for hydroelectricity, wind, solar and pumped storage. In 2005, the company utilized coal for 70% of its power generation, and renewables for 4%.

And it turns out this is no exception. A very hopeful new study found that the bulk of IRA funds are ending up in poor parts of the country.

An estimated 81% of investments in clean projects since the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage last year have been in counties with below-average weekly wages, and 86% are flowing into those with below-average college graduation rates, according to the report seen by NBC News before its release.

In addition, about 70% of clean energy investments since the law’s passage last year have been rolling out in counties where smaller shares of the population are employed, “suggesting weaker labor markets overall,” the report said.

The analysis “shows that funding is going where it’s needed most across the country, not just to the coasts or to wealthy communities,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

+The endlessly optimistic Yes! magazine has a superb new issue on the power of elders, including a lovely profile of Third Act’s Lani Ritter Hall. And the magazine will sponsor a panel Tuesday featuring Third Act’s lead advisor, the incomparable Akaya Windwood. Sign up here!

+According to the MIT Technology Review, the vast University of California system has all but abandoned carbon offsets

“We took a look across the whole market and did deeper dives into project types we thought were more promising,” says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, housed within UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, who led the effort. “And we came up almost empty.”

The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. In July, UC announced it would nearly eliminate the use of third-party offsets, charge each of its universities a carbon fee for ongoing pollution, and focus on directly cutting emissions across its campuses and health facilities. 

+A pertinent reminder from Pete Altman: it’s clearer every day that electing a Republican in 2024 will gut the Inflation Reduction Act. As he explains in great detail, “we shouldn’t underestimate the damage that lackeys and lickspittles, accountable only to Trump or the conservative movement, can do when they oversee government agencies. Especially when the knowledgeable, principled staff are gone.” Extra credit for ‘lickspittles.’

+Check out Roishetta Sibley Ozane bringing the LNG fight to national tv via NBC, which straightforwardly explained why liquefied natural gas is worse than coal. Reporter Chase Cain even brandished a CH4 molecule at the camera. (I’m in there too, if you want to see what my messy office looks like.)

+Oh, and while you’re watching video, check out Olivia Colman—I mean Oblivia Coalmine—explaining how pension funds boost fossil fuel spending.

+What could possibly go wrong? The New York Times reports that airlines are racing to convert millions of acres of midwest corn into aviation fuel.

“We’re on track to massively increase water usage without any real sense of how sensitive our aquifers are,” said Jeffrey Broberg, who is concerned about groundwater in Minnesota, a major corn state, where he is a water-use consultant and founder of the Minnesota Well Owners Organization.

United Airlines this year signed a deal with a Nebraska ethanol company to buy enough sustainable aviation fuel, as the biofuel is known, to power 50,000 flights a year. In August, Delta announced a plan to create a sustainable fuel hub in Minnesota. The Biden administration could decide on its tax incentives for the industry as soon as December.

Oh, and as Mark Jacobson (see above) points out, this won’t work either.

+Good news from Sammy Roth, who reports on a new study showing that brine from California’s Salton Sea has more lithium than previously thought.

Companies big and small have been swarming California’s largest lake for years, trying to find a cost-effective way to pull out the lithium dissolved in scorching hot fluid deep beneath the lake’s southern end. Now a new federal analysis suggests even more of the valuable metal is buried down there than we previously understood.

The new analysis — led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and reported here for the first time — finds we may be able to extract 18 million metric tons of “white gold” from the heated underground pool, which is not connected to the surface lake. That’s the first thoroughly documented public estimate of how much lithium is available at the Salton Sea, said Alex Prisjatschew, an engineer with the U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the analysis — and it’s higher than past guesses.