This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan. 

In a turning point for Michigan, a state long associated with industry and fossil fuels, the state legislature passed a package of bills that aims to cut carbon emissions, requiring 100 percent of its electricity to come from clean sources by 2040. 

The state’s new 2040 target is one of the most ambitious in the country,  bringing it in line with Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, and Oregon. 

“This really marks the first swing, industrialized state in the country to pass such sweeping legislation,” said Tim Minotas, the deputy legislative and political director for Sierra Club Michigan.

Lawmakers passed the final legislation last week along party lines. Based on Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s climate plan, it’s a big move for a state so heavily reliant on fossil fuels. 

Minotas added that it shows a momentum both in the Midwest and across the country for clean energy. 

But there are major disagreements about how effective the laws will be. 

Democrats see it as an important step toward addressing climate change. They say it will also cut energy rates and bring more than 100,000 jobs and billions of federal dollars to the state. But Republicans argue that the transition away from fossil fuels is too fast, destabilizing the grid and hiking costs. Meanwhile, environmental justice groups say it won’t do enough to reduce emissions or protect communities of color from pollution and the impacts of climate change. 

The climate package centers on a bill that requires Michigan utilities to transition completely to clean energy sources by 2040.

Betsy Coffia, a Democratic representative who serves part of northern Michigan, said the state’s lower chamber “hotly contested” what counted as clean.

“We are a single-vote majority,” she said. “And in order to get all of our colleagues on board, we did have to come up with something that everybody was willing to vote ‘yes’ to.”

According to the bill, clean energy includes nuclear power and natural gas coupled with carbon capture. Renewable energy also falls under that umbrella. It includes solar, wind, and hydropower, as well as things like gas produced by landfills and biomass (burning organic matter such as wood or agricultural waste).

The climate package requires utilities to reduce energy waste with a focus on low-income households. It also creates an office to advise the government on how to help communities and workers affected by the transition away from fossil fuels.

Republicans have pushed back.

Dave Prestin, a Republican representative from the Cedar River community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, said the legislation is the opposite of what his district needs. 

“The most urgent need is to reduce costs and increase reliability,”  he said in a joint news release. “Even if the tiny contribution Michigan makes to global emissions mattered, which it doesn’t, this plan will make living and working here harder for our residents.”

Republicans also opposed bills that will give the state’s public service commission authority to approve or deny large solar, wind, and energy storage projects. Until now, township authorities had final say over whether those projects got built — and some have blocked developments. Democrats said the change was needed to reach clean energy goals. 

John Roth, a Republican representative based in the northern community of Interlochen, said Democrats pushed through legislation without enough discussion. And while the bill requires companies to work with local governments first, he doesn’t think that’s enough. 

“You can have local control as long as you say ‘yes,’” Roth said. “You cannot say ‘no’ and still have local control.”

Groups like the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, meanwhile, said the legislation isn’t aggressive enough and will allow companies to continue polluting low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. 

“That goes against any principles of justice. It goes against science,” said the coalition’s climate justice director, Juan Jhong Chung. “We need to stop burning fossil fuels. We need to close down the power plants in Black and brown communities that are so overwhelmed because of toxic air.”

The bill also includes the state’s one commercial trash incinerator as “renewable energy,” which Jhong Chung said poses risks to nearby communities.

“If we say that trash incineration, landfills, and animal manure counts as renewable, then we’re placing all the burdens in Black and brown communities, in poor white communities, that will have to endure those dirty energy sources,” he said.

Jhong Chung said lawmakers ignored repeated calls from environmental justice groups to address their concerns. 

Instead, he said, they carved out exceptions for utilities, such as allowing natural gas plants to continue if they have carbon capture systems that store at least 90 percent of the emissions. (Carbon capture means taking the emissions from a natural gas plant and storing it in perpetuity. But it’s a new technology that doesn’t have a strong track record.) Natural gas is the biggest source of electricity in the state, followed by coal, nuclear, and renewables. 

Michigan’s two largest utilities, DTE and Consumers Energy, raised concerns about the bills’ feasibility, leading lawmakers to change them, according to Inside Climate News. The watchdog organization Energy and Policy Institute also reported that Democrats and Republicans have received a total of nearly $500,000 from both utilities.

For Democrats, the timing was urgent. Last year, they won control of the governor’s office, House, and Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years. Many saw this as the last chance for them to pass robust climate legislation; two representatives won mayoral races during the November 7 municipal elections, scrapping the party’s two-seat majority in the House. 

Federal funding was another incentive to pass the package now. Democrats say the changes are necessary for the state to compete for billions of dollars in investment through the Inflation Reduction Act. Governor Whitmer is expected to sign the bills into law.  

Jacob Corvidae works at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research firm based in Colorado. He followed developments this fall and said there is “no doubt” that this will mean big changes for the state and the region. 

“This is a huge amount of clean energy to move forward in Michigan, no matter what,” he said. “This moves us far forward on better health outcomes, better clean energy investment, all of this.”

Still, it’s unclear how changes to the state’s energy production will play out on the ground. According to Barry Rabe, an environmental policy professor at the University of Michigan, state governments have weakened renewable energy legislation in the past. 

“Michigan will really become a great national laboratory to see if this sort of clean energy revolution, as it’s being described, builds support and diversifies its constituency base over time, or might ignite some kind of a backlash or divide,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Michigan wants 100 percent of its electricity to be clean by 2040 on Nov 15, 2023.

The massive Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope is all but certain to be built now that a federal judge has ruled against environmental groups hoping to halt the development. While it’s set to be Alaska’s biggest new oil field in decades, it very well may not be the last: Willow could give ConocoPhillips and other oil companies cheaper access to vast, untapped reserves beneath the tundra.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason denied a challenge last week to the $7.5 billion project — a large expansion of ConocoPhillips’ sprawling network of oil rigs, roads, and pipelines — which the Biden administration controversially approved in March. The federal government estimates burning all the oil that Conoco hopes to extract from Willow would emit about 240 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The judge’s ruling paves the way for Conoco to drill through permafrost and slurp up 600 million barrels of oil in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, an Indiana-sized swath of mostly undeveloped tundra in the western Arctic. But that’s not all. As the company moves ahead with construction of the new oil field, it’s looking to gain access to millions, perhaps billions, more barrels farther west and southwest in the reserve beneath the wild tussocks, sloughs, and lakes where caribou and migratory birds abound.

“It’s not only itself a huge project,” said Erik Grafe, an attorney at Earthjustice, which represents the environmental groups that sued to stop the project. “It’s designed to be a hub for future development and that’s itself an even bigger problem.” 

Conoco told investors two years ago that Willow could be “the next great Alaska hub” for Arctic oil. The company leases a total of 1.1 million acres in the federal petroleum reserve, sitting on an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil. Other companies lease another 1.4 million acres combined. Many of those leases lie outside of the roughly 13 million acres where the Biden administration plans to restrict drilling.

Just last month Conoco proposed seismic surveys on about 272,000 acres of frozen earth, including an area west of the Willow site, deeper into the national oil reserve. The company initially said the surveys were intended to “determine the most efficient development” at Willow and “to identify potential future development areas” on Conoco’s leases. But the company later amended the proposal, reducing the survey area to some 160,000 acres and cutting the mention of its intention to identify future development areas. (Conoco has said the surveys are intended “exclusively” to support Willow.)

Conoco has also drilled two exploratory wells a dozen miles west of Willow — in an area named “West Willow.” The several miles of new roads and pipelines that the company plans to build at Willow could significantly lower the cost of tapping into the estimated 75 million barrels of crude beneath West Willow. 

That oil “seems like the obvious next target,” Grafe said. “Willow puts in processing facilities, central operating facilities, pipelines, roads. Once that’s in place, it’s a lot cheaper for Conoco and maybe others to develop their leases and tie into that infrastructure.” Earthjustice plans to appeal Gleason’s ruling.

The strategy of piggybacking off one oil field to lower the cost of building more isn’t new. Conoco and other companies have long been at it in Alaska. Willow itself will be part of a web of drill rigs, roads, and pipelines that have cropped up over the past few decades on the horizon of the Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut, nearly encircling the community where people rely on caribou and fish for food. (Willow is west of Nuiqsut; there are already oil fields north and east of the village.)

“This is a process that I call spiderweb sprawl,” said Philip Wight, a historian who studies Alaska’s energy sector at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “Infrastructure begets infrastructure, basically.” Wight noted that such sprawl isn’t inevitable but that the economics of oil in recent decades have made it more likely. 

Those economics may soon change, though. Development in the Arctic is getting more expensive as permafrost melts, causing the ground to buckle and damaging roads and pipelines. (Conoco has proposed using artificial chillers to keep the earth frozen and its infrastructure from collapsing.) And, even though we’re consuming more oil than ever before, analysts expect global demand for fossil fuels to peak within the decade as renewable energy takes off. 

Conoco is placing a big bet on oil prices staying high for decades, Wight said. The first drops of oil from Willow aren’t expected to flow until 2029. And were Conoco to develop West Willow — or any other leases in the reserve — it likely wouldn’t come online until after that. 

“Their thesis is that the growth of renewable energy will be slower than many people expect,” Wight said. “And their thesis is also that the world will not have unified cooperation around the Paris Climate Agreement, in that this oil and gas will not stay in the ground — it will be extracted and burned.” 

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Willow effect: Are even more Arctic oil projects on the way? on Nov 15, 2023.

Many of our everyday products contain highly toxic fluorinated chemicals known as per- and poly-fluoroalkyl…

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A new United Nations Climate Change report says that current climate action plans by nations are not enough to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius and meet Paris Agreement targets.

The report shows that countries need to take much more action immediately, even though some have been making increased efforts, in order to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and avoid the worst climate change impacts, a press release from the United Nations said.

“Today’s report shows that governments combined are taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis. And it shows why governments must make bold strides forward at COP28 in Dubai, to get on track,” said Simon Stiell, executive-secretary of UN Climate Change, in the press release. “This means COP28 must be a clear turning point. Governments must not only agree what stronger climate actions will be taken but also start showing exactly how to deliver them.”

Stiell pointed out that following the first COP28 global stocktake is when countries will be able to “regain momentum” to increase their efforts and get on the right path to meet Paris Agreement goals.

“The Global Stocktake report released by UN Climate Change this year clearly shows where progress is too slow. But it also lays out the vast array of tools and solutions put forward by countries. Billions of people expect to see their governments pick up this toolbox and put it to work,” Stiell said.

Most recently, science from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has indicated that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 43 percent by 2030, in comparison to 2019 levels. This amount will also be essential to limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the most dire climate change impacts, such as more severe and frequent heat waves, droughts and rainfall.

“Every fraction of a degree matters, but we are severely off track. COP28 is our time to change that,” Stiell added. “It’s time to show the massive benefits now of bolder climate action: more jobs, higher wages, economic growth, opportunity and stability, less pollution and better health.”

UN Climate Change’s analysis looked at the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) of the 195 Parties to the Paris Agreement, which included 20 updated or new NDCs submitted through September 25 of this year. The report showed that emissions were not showing the fast downward trajectory that science indicates is needed this decade.

“Global ambition stagnated over the past year and national climate plans are strikingly misaligned with the science,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, as Reuters reported. “The chasm between need and action is more menacing than ever.”

The implementation of the most recently available NDCs would lead to emissions levels increasing by approximately 8.8 percent compared to 2010 levels, the press release said. That is only a slight improvement over the assessment from 2022.

Emissions levels are predicted to be two percent lower than those in 2019 by 2030, which means global emissions will peak this decade.

The report said that, in order for emissions to peak before 2030, “the conditional elements of the NDCs need to be implemented, which depends mostly on access to enhanced financial resources, technology transfer and technical cooperation, and capacity-building support; as well as the availability of market-based mechanisms,” according to the press release.

Stiell emphasized that the Global Stocktake and COP28 would be essential for developing a strategy to get on track with fossil fuel reductions.

“Using the Global Stocktake to plan ahead, we can make COP28 a game-changer. And provide a springboard for a two-year climate action surge,” Stiell said. “We need to rebuild trust in the Paris process. Which means delivering on all commitments, particularly on finance, the great enabler of climate action. And ensuring that we are increasing resilience to climate impacts everywhere.”

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The U.S. has released its fifth National Climate Assessment report, which outlines how the country is addressing climate change, major climate risks and actions by region and how climate change is already impacting the country.

The report found that both new and existing risks are impacting every part of the U.S., while some regions may be perceiving short-term benefits. However, the long-term risks of climate change — including sea level rise, flooding, drought, and extreme heat — are expected to outweigh any brief benefits.

“Every increment of global warming leads to larger increases in temperature in many regions, including much of the United States,” the report explained. “At a [global warming level] of 2°C (3.6°F), the average temperature across the United States is very likely to increase between 4.4°F and 5.6°F (2.4°C and 3.1°C). For every additional 1°C of global warming, the average U.S. temperature is projected to increase by around 2.5°F (1.4 °C).”

Another major risk concerns how climate change will affect human health. Heat-related diseases and death, increasing geographic range for some types of infectious diseases, increasing exposure to poor air quality and worsening mental health outcomes are all health risks outlined in the assessment, which has a full chapter on health and an additional section on COVID-19 and climate change.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, climate-related hazards, like extreme weather events, threaten human health and put a strain on health care systems. For instance, the 2019 Missouri River and North Central Flood blocked hospital access for those in need, increased exposure to pollutants and infectious diseases in the flood waters and led to $10 billion in damage. 

The department noted that many health care facilities across the country are at risk of flooding, with hospitals at a 9.3% chance, nursing homes at 10.2% and pharmacies at 12.1%.

However, with emissions mitigation efforts, the U.S. could actually see health and economic benefits that outweigh the cost of implementing the efforts. 

“Each metric ton of CO2 reduced is estimated to bring about health benefits in the U.S. that are valued between $8 to $430 (in 2022 dollars), mainly from avoided premature death,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shared in a press release.

The report shares current mitigation efforts across the U.S. as well as additional mitigation and adaptation actions that can be taken, and notes that mitigation efforts to reduce greenhouse gases have increased in every region of the country since 2018. 

But some of the impacts of worsening climate change are inevitable, the report warned. Because of past emissions, ocean surface temperatures and sea levels will continue rising, and even the most catastrophic outcomes of climate change can’t be ruled out.

Ultimately, the assessment explained that reaching net-zero emissions will be essential for curbing the worst impacts of climate change.

“If emissions do not fall rapidly, the risks of extreme weather, compound events, and other climate impacts will continue to grow,” the report authors wrote. “How much more the world warms depends on the choices societies make today. The future is in human hands.”

The U.S. currently has a target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, including a goal to reduce emissions 50% to 52% compared to 2005 levels in 2030. However, Climate Action Tracker found that U.S. policies and targets are not in line to meet these targets. The group estimated that the U.S. is likely to reduce emissions by just 28% to 34% by 2030.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment was released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). USGCRP led the report, which combines research and data from nearly 500 authors and 250 contributors from all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

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Biologist Sir David Attenborough, who is 97, has been documenting the natural world and, more recently, the effects of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity, for most of his life.

More than 50 animal taxa have been named after the English natural historian, and one of them, the egg-laying mammal Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, was recently rediscovered after being believed to be extinct for more than six decades.

Before the nocturnal echidna, which resembles a hedgehog with a long snout like an anteater, was rediscovered in July, the last recording of the species was by a Dutch botanist in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia in 1961, reported The Guardian.

The recent rediscovery was made during an expedition led by researchers from Oxford University in the only known habitat of the elusive creature. The research team spent a month searching for Attenborough’s namesake with the help of 80 field cameras, NPR reported.

Finally, on the expedition’s last day, evidence of the shy, long-lost echidna waddled through the frame.

“It came down to that very final moment,” said biologist James Kempton of Oxford University, who led the expedition, as reported by NPR. “It was the very last images, from the final camera that we collected, on the final day of the last ascent of the expedition. It was intense relief initially because we spent so much effort — and then euphoria.”

Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna is part of a small group of five existing species of egg-laying mammals, which includes the platypus.

“The reason it appears so unlike other mammals is because it is a member of the monotremes, an egg-laying group that separated from the rest of the mammal tree-of-life about 200m years ago,” Kempton said, as The Guardian reported.

Another species of echidna is found in New Guinea and Australia.

The researchers navigated northeastern Papua New Guinea with the help of local villagers from Yongsu Sapari. During their exploration of the remote region, they endured earthquakes, leeches and malaria.

The echidna live at the highest elevations of the steep and craggy Cyclops Mountains.

“You’re slipping all over the place. You’re being scratched and cut. There are venomous animals around you, deadly snakes,” Kempton said, as reported by BBC News. “There are leeches literally everywhere. The leeches are not only on the floor, but these leeches climb trees, they hang off the trees and then drop on you to suck your blood.”

Kempton expressed hopes that rediscovering Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, which is critically endangered but not currently a protected species, would help protect biodiversity in the Cyclops Mountains. 

“Given so much of that rainforest hasn’t been explored, what else is out there that we haven’t yet discovered? The Attenborough long-beaked echidna is a symbol of what we need to protect — to ensure we can discover it,” Kempton said, as BBC News reported.

The post Mammal Named After David Attenborough Rediscovered After 60 Years appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new United Nations report finds that countries’ current plans to reduce their carbon emissions would actually increase global emissions 8.8 percent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels — falling far short of the drastic cuts needed to limit warming.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set a target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), countries agreed to submit plans detailing how they would do their part to curb emissions. These plans are known as “nationally determined contributions,” and countries are encouraged to strengthen them frequently. But year after year, the U.N. has found a wide gap between the commitments made and the action needed to reach the Paris target — a 45 percent reduction in global emissions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. Last year, the same report projected that emissions would rise 10.6 percent by 2030, making this year’s finding a minor improvement. 

“Today’s report shows that governments combined are only taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in a video released on Tuesday. “And it shows why governments must make bold strides forward at COP28 in Dubai to get on track.”

At the end of this month, world leaders are expected to review their commitments at the annual U.N. climate talks in Dubai and agree to set more ambitious national goals under the Paris Agreement. A report that the U.N. released in September found that countries are coming up short on almost every goal set in the landmark climate treaty, including by making inadequate progress on adaptation efforts and failing to provide enough financing to developing countries.

One encouraging sign from today’s report is that if countries follow through on their current commitments, emissions are expected to be 2 percent lower in 2030 than in 2019. That means that global emissions would peak within this decade. In order for that to happen, the report stresses that countries need to implement all parts of their climate action plans, which include enhancing financial and technological resources and leaning on market-based mechanisms, such as a new global carbon market.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat also released a second report today on countries’ long-term emissions reduction plans. The report found that if the 75 countries that have submitted long-term plans follow through on their commitments, including net-zero targets, their emissions will decline 63 percent by 2050 from 2019 levels. The countries represent 68 percent of the world’s population and 77 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Stiell nodded toward the fact that over the years, climate advocates and even former U.N. officials have grown weary of the annual climate negotiations and the lack of progress achieved at them. “We need to rebuild trust in the Paris process, which means delivering on all commitments,” he said. But he noted that countries can still take tangible steps to keep 1.5 degrees C in reach. 

A report by the International Energy Agency published in September found that countries can still reach net-zero emissions by 2050 — and have a shot at keeping warming to 1.5 degrees C — if they triple renewable power capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. 

“This means COP28 must be a clear turning point,” Stiell said. “Governments must not only agree that stronger climate actions will be taken, but also start showing exactly how to deliver them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UN: Countries’ current climate action plans would raise emissions on Nov 14, 2023.

Tropical rain forests have declined from 14% of the Earth land to just 6%. They…

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