Water

Though Not Everywhere

Asheville, today

If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.

As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:

Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.

But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain).

I know how this works, because my home state of Vermont is mostly steep mountains and narrow valleys. Once the rain drops, it’s funneled very quickly down the saturated hillsides; placid streams become raging torrents that fill up those bottomlands, covering farm fields with soil; when the water starts to drain, everything is coated with mud. These towns are going to be cut off for a while—our mountain hamlet in Vermont was effectively isolated for a couple of weeks last summer. And these are places where cellphones don’t work in the best of times. Things get pre-modern very fast.

Were it happening just in one place, a compassionate world could figure out how to offer effective relief. But it’s happening in so many places. The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.

But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).

Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning

“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”

In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.

All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).

This means that our political leaders are finally going to have to make hard choices (or not, which is its own way of choosing). Brazil, for instance, is hoping to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon—which at least, given Brazil’s relative poverty, is somewhat understandable, if still insane. America’s politicians, under much less economic pressure, are facing similar choices, some of them as soon as the lame duck session after the November elections. Expect, for instance, a renewed push to open up new permits for LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. Pausing those permits was the most important step the Biden administration took to rein in Big Oil, and Houston’s been outraged ever since; it’s why they’re pouring money into the Trump campaign. And it’s why they have their errand boys in the Congress—outgoing Senator Joe Manchin, Wyoming’s John Barrasso—proposing a trade: permitting reform that would make it easier to build renewable energy in America, in exchange for ramping up LNG exports that would undercut renewable energy in Asia.

The numbers on whether this trade “makes sense” are complicated and contentious. Here’s a report from Third Way arguing yes, here’s a set of charts from the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons arguing that it will dramatically raise gas prices for those American consumers still tied to propane. New peer-reviewed numbers from the gold-standard methane scientist Bob Howarth at Cornell make it clear that these LNG exports are worse than coal; that prompted 125 climate scientists to write to the administration asking them to “follow the science.”

In the end, this decision will likely come down to politics. It’s not just Big Oil that’s willing to make such a trade—New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, in line to be Democratic leader on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when Manchin yachts back to West Virginia, has come out for the trade, assuredly because New Mexico gets a large share of its government revenues from taxing the natural gas under its part of the Permian basin. Northeastern Democrats will vote against, fearing not just climate destruction but the rise in gas prices as we send the commodity abroad. Meanwhile, the good people of the Gulf suffer from the grievous local environmental impacts of these giant plants, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere keeps rocketing up.

If Trump wins, there’s no need for a deal—the LNG projects will be approved, and permitting reform for renewables will be dead. If Harris wins and the Dems hold the Senate, at least there’s a chance that environmentalists can make it easier to build solar and wind without yielding on the massive carbon bomb and EJ disaster that is LNG export. That’s why I’m in Montana today, trying in my small way to help Jon Tester in his uphill fight to retain a Senate seat. And it’s why I’m in the swing states most of the time between now and November 5. Thousands of Third Act volunteers are deploying themselves far and wide to win this contest—you can join us on the Silver Wave tour in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. (Please join us, even if you haven’t reached sixty yet—we don’t check IDs and we love working with young people).

The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now.

In other energy and climate news:

Italy and Switzerland have to redraw their border because rapid glacier melt around the Matterhorn is literally changing the region’s topography

“Significant sections of the border are defined by the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn or perpetual snow,” the Swiss government said in a statement cited by Bloomberg. “These formations are changing due to the melting of glaciers.”

Swiss glaciers lost 4% of their volume in 2023, the second-biggest annual decline on record, according to the Swiss Academy of Sciences. The largest decline was 6% in 2022.

Experts have stopped measuring the ice on some Swiss glaciers because there is none left.

The remains of a German mountain climber who disappeared while crossing a glacier near the Matterhorn nearly 40 years ago were discovered in melting ice in July last year.

+A useful piece from Isabela Dias in Mother Jones offers a brutal reminder of just what Trump’s mass deportation plan—much of it aimed at climate refugees—would look like

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Meanwhile, the great oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz, writing in Rolling Stone, reminds us that one reason Big Oil is fighting so hard to elect Trump is simply to keep the tax breaks he won them last time around.

+Rightwing groups linked to the Supreme Court puppet master Leonard Leo are arguing that it would be ‘corrupt’ to educate judges about the science of climate change. (In particular, no one should tell Clarence Thomas about the mileage of the motorhome he was gifted by people with business before the court!)

+North Carolina may have been hit harder than any other state by Hurricane Helene; it’s also being hit harder by gas industry plans to expand its empire. As Lisa Sorg reports,

It’s at the peak of summer, and lush forests cover the landscape in green brocade. Helena Moriah Road, sinuous and narrow, hems in the fields whose ripening rows of corn are ribbed like corduroy.

Suddenly there it is: the future factory for freezing and liquifying natural gas, now a brown scour of rubble and dirt. 

Ascend another 5,000 feet, and the rest of the fossil fuel industry’s expansive buildout would come into view: there’s Hyco Lake in northern Person County, where Duke Energy plans to build two new natural gas-fired power plants to replace the existing ones that burn coal. 

From there, Dominion’s proposed natural gas pipeline, called the T15 Reliability Project, would traverse from the new Duke plants 45 miles west to Eden, in Rockingham County. 

Near Eden, more natural gas would flow through the Southgate portion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. And finally, to the southwest an expansion of a Transco pipeline would cross 28 miles between Rockingham, Guilford, Forsyth and Davidson counties.

Add Duke’s two proposed natural gas plants in Catawba County and four compressor stations, and the result would be hundreds of thousands of tons of new greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere from North Carolina each year.

+Those Democratic shills over at the…Wall Street Journal report that Jill Stein has been hiring Republican operatives to boost her presidential campaign.

Federal Election Commission records show Stein paid $100,000 in July to a consulting outfit that has worked with Republican campaigns, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid. The firm, Accelevate, is operated by Trent Pool. The Intercept reported that he appeared to be part of the mob that breached the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Journal hasn’t independently verified the reporting.

+Ed Milliband is the minister for Energy Security in the new UK Labor government, and he just gave one of the better and more plainspoken speeches I’ve read from a government official on the climate crisis. (It made me remember him interviewing me for a podcast from a tiny garret of his London apartment years ago—good people do end up in positions of power sometimes!)

The sustainability case is clear because we know it is the use of fossil fuels that is driving the climate crisis.  

But the security case too is stark—and I think has been too often underplayed. 

It has been put well by my Irish counterpart Eamon Ryan who I met last week, who rightly says: “No one has ever weaponised access to the sun or the wind.”

Homegrown clean energy from renewables and nuclear offers us a security that fossil fuels simply cannot provide. 

The energy is produced here, consumed here and is not subject to the same volatility of international markets.

And it is on affordability that the most transformative development of recent years has taken place: the dramatic drop in the price of renewables. 

This is a genuinely transformative change since I was Energy Secretary in the 2000s. Since 2015 alone, despite recent global cost pressures, the price of both onshore wind and solar has still fallen by more than a third.

The price of offshore wind has halved.

And the price of batteries has fallen by more than two-thirds.

This means, on the basis of the prices in our recent auction, renewables are the cheapest form of power to build and operate. I could not have said that back in 2008.

And the price of fixed offshore wind in the auction was around 5 to 7 times lower than the price of electricity, driven by the price of gas, at the peak of the energy crisis.

Cheap, clean renewables offer us price stability that fossil fuels simply cannot provide.

That means that if we are serious about energy security, family security, economic security and national security, we need the greater energy independence that only clean energy can give us.

+Did you know that Princeton University owned its own oil company, named PetroTiger for the school’s mascot. Not many did, until a junior at the college uncovered the scheme for a recent report. Students at five other universities found similar deep ties between the fossil fuel industry and their schools

The researchers scraped tax forms for publicly disclosed donations to universities from oil companies’ charitable arms, scoured schools’ boards for names linked to fossil fuel interests and tracked conflict of interest statements in published academic articles to document fossil fuel funding. Students from public universities also filed public information requests to obtain additional financial information.

Since 2003, the researchers found, the six schools have together accepted over $100m in fossil fuel industry-tied funding, defined as money from fossil fuel companies or their charitable arms. Millions more in funding are coming from firms that “enable” the fossil fuel industry, the students said, such as banks that fund oil expansion or groups that have spread climate disinformation. These numbers are sure to be understatements, the students said, as most university research centers do not disclose their donors publicly, and as some students only tracked contributions over the past decade.

The six schools also published a collective 1,507 academic articles funded by oil and gas interests, raising the students’ concerns about bias. And the universities have placed numerous fossil fuel-tied individuals on various boards, including in some cases on governing boards which are often responsible for setting institutions’ policies.

+The world could triple its renewable energy capacity by decade’s end, getting back somewhere near the path scientists have said we must get on to avoid the very worst. But as the new report from the International Energy Agency concluded,

It’s still a tough climb ahead with a hell of a lot new infrastructure needed. But falling costs and supportive policies can help them get there.

“To ensure the world doesn’t miss this huge opportunity, the focus must shift rapidly to implementation,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said

Countries are going to need a lot more renewable energy to succeed. And they’re going to have to make major investments in infrastructure, the report says. Around 25 million kilometers (15.534 million miles) of electricity grids need to be built or updated by 2030. A decade later, by 2040, the equivalent of all of the world’s existing power grids would need to be refurbished or built new to support Paris climate goals, the IEA has previously estimated.

+We’ve begun, thankfully, to hear a lot about the stress that climate anxiety places on young people. But Mom’s Clean Air Force reports that older Americans feel many of the same things:

In addition to the burden of navigating extreme weather as an older adult, grandparents may also have unique experiences of climate anxiety—a term that has come to describe feelings of emotional distress about how climate change is unraveling the world as we know it and expected it to be. Dr. Robin Cooper, a clinical psychiatrist and co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, told me about her experience of climate distress:

“When my daughter was pregnant with her first child, I had a lot of anxiety that I didn’t have [during my own pregnancy]. I had dreams about not being able to protect those that I loved. To this day, my grandchildren are in a part of my brain that has a tight compartment around it… It is really, really hard for me, and I think for everyone, to truly imagine a world in a way that is not one that we’ve known before, to think about the future. I can’t imagine it, and I don’t want to imagine it when it comes to my own grandchildren.”

+Lots of companies make big claims about their commitment to climate action—but as Ben Elgin reports at Bloomberg, lots of those companies also belong to trade associations that do everything they can to undercut climate legislation

When it comes to climate change, there are two Chipotles.

One is the fast-casual burrito chain with a focus on sustainable ingredients, an app that lets customers track the carbon footprint of their orders and a goal to halve its heat-trapping emissions in the next six years to help fix “one of the most pressing issues of our time,” the company says. The other is a key member of the Restaurant Law Center, an industry trade group that is suing and supporting litigation to beat back pivotal climate rules.

Such contradictions are rife among many of the world’s biggest hotel operators and restaurant chains. Marriott and Hilton have pledged to cut their carbon emissions by almost half by 2030, while the parent companies of KFC, Taco Bell and Burger King have made similar climate commitments. But all of these companies are important members of powerful trade associations that have recently filed lawsuits to overturn critical local and state climate rules. The litigation could deter climate action among city and state lawmakers, who have surpassed the gridlocked federal government as the primary drivers of green policies in the US.

+The long-awaited 2024 version of the F-list is out, documenting the work that public relations and ad agencies are doing for Big Oil.

Take, for eexample, PR giant Edelman

Edelman is perhaps the most notorious PR agency for its fossil fuel interests. It has a long history of lobbying, from astroturf campaigns for the American Petroleum Institute to recruiting support for TC Energy’s oil sands pipeline. Richard Edelman has been named as one of the Guardian’s top climate villains and he seems keen on cementing his legacy. 

Ironically, despite its work to deceive the public, Edelman has tried to build a name for itself around trust through a series of reports called the Trust Barometer, which it has used to promote petrostates like the United Arab Emirates and clean up its image. 

Edelman’s lobbying efforts for the UAE since 2007 resulted in the petrostate being chosen to host COP28, with Edelman working on the summit. The COP28 in-house communications team was led by the ex-Edelman executive Alan VanderMolen. Since then, Edelman continues to work for Masdar.

In the last year, Edelman has not made any new climate commitments, but they have renewed their contract with Shell. Their corporate position is that they are “proud of the work [they] do to support [their] energy clients.” Clean Creatives has revealed that Edelman worked for the Koch Foundation in 2022 and, in the 2024 F-List, we have exclusively uncovered three new Edelman contracts with Chevron, Sasol and ConocoPhillips from 2023 - 2024.