Vermont’s House of Representatives has passed S.259, a state bill aimed at collecting recovery costs for climate-related damages from the biggest emitters, such as fossil fuel companies.
The bill, called the Climate Superfund Act, was introduced to create a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program, in which fossil fuel businesses would undergo an assessment to determine their share of costs for fossil fuel extraction or refinement actions that led to increased greenhouse gases and related costs in the state.
As reported by NBC News, the agency would measure extreme weather linked to climate change in the state and the cost of damages from extreme weather events through attribution science. From there, the agency would calculate companies’ emissions from 1995 to 2024 to determine a share of the costs to charge each company.
According to the bill, costs collected from the program would be put into a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program Fund, managed by the state’s Agency of Natural Resources, with funds going toward state projects that improve adaption or resilience to climate change.
“We’re able to say very clearly, ‘We would not be experiencing these intense global temperatures without human-caused climate change and the history of carbon pollution,’” Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at the nonprofit Climate Central, told NBC News.
“New England has had a 60% increase in the heaviest precipitation days,” Pershing added. “For every 1-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, you get a 4% increase in the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold.”
The bill still needs to go through a final approval vote in the state Senate before going to the governor for signing. If it does pass, Vermont would be the first state with a law that holds companies with high emissions financially responsible for climate-related damages to the state. Other states, including New York, Massachusetts, California and Maryland are working toward passing similar legislation.
But the bill could face further hurdles to becoming a law. As The Guardian reported, Republican Governor Phil Scott could potentially veto the bill, but supporters believe they would have enough votes to overturn a veto, if it happens. Even without a veto, the law could face many battles in court from companies that oppose it.
Still, the bill’s supporters believe in fighting for the bill, pointing to strong attribution science that links human activities to climate change and its consequences.
“You see towns across the state underwater, and communities and businesses financially devastated. The reality of the climate crisis just really comes crashing home,” Ben Edgerly Walsh, climate and energy program director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, told NBC News. “These are facts that we are dealing with in real time that we need the financial resources to deal with.”
Vermont just experienced its warmest winter on record, Burlington Free Press reported. Last summer, the state broke more records in rainfall and flooding, which cost the Northeast an estimated $2.2 billion.
While the Gulf of Mexico is a region known for oil, it’s also home to something far less expected. Nestled among offshore oil platforms, about 150 miles from Houston, is one of the healthiest coral reefs in the world: the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
Marine researchers who have visited the Flower Garden Banks describe it with awe in their voices. “When you look out, it can be almost disorienting because there’s so much coral,” said Michelle Johnston, superintendent of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
As reefs around the world bleach at alarming rates, scientists are racing to study and preserve this remarkable coral reef in the unlikeliest of places. “We have these magical underwater places, [and yet they are] completely surrounded by the oil and gas industry,” Johnston said.
A panoramic image of East Flower Garden Bank, where coral cover is upwards of 80 percent.
Emma Hickerson / Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary via NOAA
To understand how both can exist in such close proximity, it helps to understand the history of the region. Roughly 190 million years ago, the ocean here was drying up, leaving behind a massive plain of salt. Over the ages, that dried-up layer of salt was buried deep in the earth.
And eventually, a new body of water — the Gulf of Mexico — formed high above it. Because salt is less dense than the surrounding rock, the layer slowly rose toward the surface, pushing the earth above it, while pulling up massive oil deposits from below. Slowly, this shift created enormous underwater mountains known as “salt domes.” Looking at a map of the Gulf of Mexico today, you can see that many of its oil drilling sites are on those same underwater mountains.
A few of these mountains rose so high that sunlight was just able to filter down through the water to reach them. And roughly 10,000 years ago, coral polyps latched onto the peaks and started to grow. Those underwater mountaintops are now the Flower Garden Banks.
Because the reef is so far from the shore, it’s been protected from many threats like overfishing and coastal pollution. And because of its depth and northern latitude, the water here is about as cold as corals can tolerate, essentially protecting the Flower Garden Banks from global warming. In the summer of 2023, for example, while other reefs throughout the Caribbean were being ravaged by heat stress and bleaching, the unique geology of Flower Gardens allowed it to fare better than the rest.
But this same unique geology has also turned the region into a massive hub for offshore oil drilling.
“When you’re offshore diving at the Flower Gardens, you look around from the dive boat and you can see oil and gas platforms in every direction,” Johnston said. “So there’s all of this industry happening around this beautiful place.”
Oil platforms are visible through the haze near the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Galveston, Texas, Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023.
LM Otero / AP Photo
For now, the reef has thankfully avoided any catastrophic oil spills, but that doesn’t mean that oil hasn’t left its mark. In fact, the legacy of oil extraction, carbon emissions, and climate change are quite literally etched into the hard skeletons of the corals themselves.
“I think of that skeletal material as a little time capsule,” said Amy Wagner, a scientist who studies corals to find clues about Earth’s past.
Back when she was a graduate student in 2005, Wagner and a team of scientists came to Flower Garden Banks in search of one very specific type of coral, Siderastrea siderea. “They just look like a bunch of rocks on the bottom,” she said.
The team dove down 78 feet, to the peaks of these ancient mountaintops, and drilled a nearly 6-foot-long core of this slow-growing species of coral — a 250-year record of pollution, climate change, and even world events. “You start to drill in and, especially in that initial drilling, you’re getting the tissue layer of the coral,” Wagner said. “And you end up having a lot of fish come in, because it’s free food, right?”
Amy Wagner’s team drills a coral sample from the Flower Garden Banks in 2005. Courtesy of Amy Wagner and John Halas
After hours of drilling, they patched up the hole and swam the 6-foot-long core to the surface. Back at the lab, they split open the core samples and x-rayed them. “They’re like trees,” Wagner said. “You can count the tree rings and go back in time. Corals produce these annual bands.”
Every year, the living coral organism lays down a new growth band, using the nutrients and minerals it pulls out of the seawater. Essentially, whatever’s in the seawater makes it into that year’s layer of coral skeleton. “So we have this long record of these little, tiny time capsules that are sort of locking in the ocean chemistry,” Wagner said.
Using a high-tech version of a dentist’s drill, Wagner and her colleague Kristine DeLong, a professor at Louisiana State University, collected a tiny bit of dust from each growth band. Then, like detectives, they analyzed different elements in the dust for clues, looking at the variations in the coral core over time.
Amy Wagner holds a coral core collected from the Flower Garden Banks
Jesse Nichols / Grist
Just like humans, corals build their skeletons out of calcium. But sometimes they make mistakes, accidentally grabbing look-alike elements from the seawater. One of those elements is barium, which is often used as a lubricant in offshore oil wells. During the 1970s energy crisis, oil drilling boomed in the Gulf of Mexico. And Wagner and DeLong could see that spike reflected in the barium levels in the coral: When oil prices crashed, production went down, and so did the barium.
There are many other histories scientists can see etched in this coral core. By looking at nitrogen, they can see the rise of fertilizer pollution from the Mississippi River. By looking at radioactive carbon, they can see the rise of nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War.
And the corals even tell the story of how fossil fuels are changing the climate — in the words of one scientist, “recording their own demise.” To see how, it’s important to know that carbon atoms aren’t all exactly the same. They actually come in a few different weights, depending on the number of neutrons in each carbon atom. A carbon atom with seven neutrons is called “heavy carbon,” while an atom with six neutrons is called “light carbon.” Plants prefer to use the light carbon for photosynthesis. So, inside of a plant, the carbon atoms tend to be a little bit lighter than those, say, inside of a volcano.
Fossil fuels come from ancient plants, which are full of light carbon. As fossil fuel emissions rise, the carbon atoms in our atmosphere are slowly getting lighter.
An X-Ray view of a coral core reveals annual growth bands that scientists can use to detect environmental change
Courtesy of Kristine DeLong
You can see this same trend playing out inside of the corals: The carbon in the coral slowly gets lighter in the band samples as the world burns more fossil fuels. As those fossil fuel emissions warm the climate, they put reefs around the world in danger.
Today, the Flower Garden Banks are still holding on, but they won’t be safe forever. As early as 2040, the Flower Garden Banks could start to see major bleaching events every summer. If we can reduce our emissions at a more reasonable pace, climate models say we might be able to buy an extra 15 to 20 years for the Flower Garden Banks — essentially doubling its window of time. That window would be critical for the sanctuary staff and independent scientists who are working hard to study and protect what might become one of the last coral reefs.
“Going to a place like Flower Gardens, it’s like — these corals, they’re still pretty darn healthy,” said DeLong. “Being able to manage those reefs and take care of them is important, because they may be the last ones we have.”
Recently, scientists at the Flower Garden Banks have started collecting corals from the reef and storing them in an onshore coral lab. The hope is to eventually bank enough coral here in case the worst happens.
Coral fragments from the Flower Garden Banks are housed in the coral rescue lab at the Moody Gardens Aquarium in Galveston, Texas.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
“It is a grim prospect,” Johnston said. “It’s better to be proactive and have some things banked versus getting into the situation where all the corals have bleached and died and we have nothing left. It’s my hope that nature can figure things out and things can adapt. I think the problem is that the climate is changing quickly enough that there might not be time.”
The Flower Garden Banks are a product of 10,000 years of slow, steady growth, capturing annual snapshots of our world, in small millimeter-sized chapters. The next few decades will be critical in determining just how much longer this reef will be able to continue its ancient undersea story.
More so than any other fossil fuel company, Occidental Petroleum — known as Oxy — has built its climate strategy around innovations that capture carbon before it can be emitted or pull it directly out of the air. The Texas-based oil giant, which made more than $23 billion in revenue last year, says on its website that these “visionary technologies” will help it achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and enable a lower-carbon future.
Scientists agree that such technologies will be necessary to limit global warming. But Oxy’s plans for them appear to be less about sustainability and more about creating a “license to pollute,” according to a new analysis from the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch. The analysis describes Oxy’s focus on carbon capture and removal as a “costly fig leaf for business as usual,” allowing the company to claim emissions reductions while continuing to profit from the sale of fossil fuels — rebranded as “net-zero oil” and “sustainable aviation fuels.”
The company “makes this whole spiel about meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals, but it’s very clearly flying in the face of that,” said Marlène Ramón Hernández, an expert on carbon removal at Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report. “What we have to do is phase out fossil fuels, not perpetuate their life.”
Oxy first outlined its net-zero strategy in 2020, making it the first American oil major to do so. Today, Oxy describes that strategy using four R’s: The company says it will “reduce” operational emissions, “revolutionize” carbon management, “remove” carbon from the atmosphere, and “reuse/recycle” it to produce new low-carbon or zero-emissions products. Its overarching goal is to achieve net-zero emissions for its operations and indirect energy use by 2040.
This is where the problems begin, according to Carbon Market Watch. Despite Oxy’s net-zero pledge for its operation and energy use, it is much vaguer about the emissions associated with the oil and gas it sells. These emissions, known as Scope 3 emissions, represented more than 90 percent of Oxy’s greenhouse gas footprint in 2022. The company has asserted an “ambition” to zero them out by 2050.
However, Oxy does not plan to reduce Scope 3 emissions by phasing down the production of oil and gas, but through investments in carbon removal. Direct air capture, or DAC — a technology that uses large fans and chemical reactions to separate carbon dioxide from the air — is a main focus. An Oxy subsidiary called Oxy Low Carbon Ventures announced in 2022 that it would deploy up to 135 DAC plants by 2035, and last year Oxy bought a major DAC technology company for $1.1 billion.
A DAC facility owned by the Swiss company Climeworks.
Halldor Kolbeins / AFP via Getty Images
Some of Oxy’s DAC projects are already in the pipeline. The largest, called Stratos, is under construction in the Permian Basin, a massive oil field, in Texas. If it reaches its nameplate capacity of capturing half a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — which Oxy says it will do by mid-2025 — it will be 14 times larger than the biggest DAC facility in the world. (That facility, owned by the Swiss company Climeworks, began operating in Iceland this week with a nominal capacity of 36,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.)
In order for DAC to result in net removal of carbon dioxide, however, captured carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for good. This is usually achieved by locking it up in rock formations. Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub, however, has said this would be a “waste of a valuable product,” and instead plans to use the captured carbon. In one application, it would be converted into synthetic electrofuels — low-carbon fuels produced from their chemical constituents using electricity — and sold to other companies.
The other major application is for a process known as enhanced oil recovery, where CO2 is injected into oil and gas wells in order to extract hard-to-reach reserves of fossil fuels. This forms the basis for Oxy’s “net-zero oil” claims. According to the company’s logic, the atmospheric carbon dioxide injected into the ground cancels out any new emissions from the oil and gas it’s used to pull up. In an interview with NPR last December, Hollub said this approach means that “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever.”
Neither Carbon Market Watch nor the independent experts Grist spoke to look favorably on these approaches. Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT who was not involved in the report, called it “absurd” to use captured carbon to make so-called sustainable aviation fuels; these fuels will eventually be burned, re-releasing the captured carbon back into the atmosphere.
In fact, the whole process may result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, since DAC is an energy-intensive process that is often powered by fossil fuels. Oxy has no publicly announced plans to power its carbon capture and removal facilities with renewable energy. “They’ll be releasing more CO2 than they’re capturing,” Harvey said.
As for “net-zero oil,” Carbon Market Watch calls it an “oxymoron and a logical fallacy.” A 2021 analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory suggests that this application would also result in net-positive emissions — both because it takes so much energy (likely supplied by fossil fuels) just to run a DAC plant, and, because every metric ton of carbon dioxide injected into oil fields extracts two to three barrels of oil. Each barrel of oil generates half a metric ton of carbon dioxide when burned, which means each metric ton of carbon dioxide used for Oxy’s net-zero oil may create 1 to 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions.
Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub speaks at a panel during the World Petroleum Congress conference in 2021.
Brandon Bell / Getty Images
Hernández said she is also concerned about Oxy’s plans to generate carbon credits from its DAC projects. Even though none of its planned DAC facilities has been built yet, Oxy has already pre-sold or is in negotiations to sell DAC-generated carbon credits representing between 1.63 million and 1.98 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to Carbon Market Watch’s calculations. If the company uses the same captured carbon to offset its own emissions and generate credits, which can be used to offset the emissions of another company, “This is a blatant issue of double-counting,” Hernandez told Grist.
Oxy did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Holly Jean Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo, said it’s possible to pursue DAC responsibly. Even a moonshot project like Stratos could be seen as having an important demonstration or research value. “The point is to figure out if the technology is going to work at a real-world level,” she told Grist.
That said, she agreed there are ways Oxy could make its DAC agenda more credible. “They could make a commitment to building renewable power to power it,” she offered, or donate the technology to developing countries.
Buck and some other academics say fossil fuel companies should be doing more of this research — or at least footing the bill for it — in order to take responsibility for their role in the climate crisis. Harvey, however, argues there’s an opportunity cost to such research and deployment, which is expensive. He and other researchers have estimated that it will cost Oxy’s Stratos facility $500 to capture each metric ton of carbon dioxide. (The company predicts costs will fall to around $200 per ton by 2030.)
Every dollar spent on DAC means a dollar not spent on more reliable, immediate emissions reductions. “There’s low-hanging fruit to do before you get there,” he said, like building renewable energy for non-DAC purposes, insulating houses, installing heat pumps, or putting more batteries on the grid with existing renewables.
“Almost anything is better” than DAC, Harvey said.
As an essential first step toward a more credible net-zero strategy, Hernández suggested that Oxy abandon its aggressive plans to extract more oil and gas, since doing so is misaligned with scientists’ call for adramatic cut in production in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). “It’s actually planning to increase its oil production, so there is clearly no intention there to transition to net-zero,” she said.
We take for granted the endless flow of electrons that enable modern life just as we take for granted the air we breathe. Yet, an outage can occur at almost any time, usually when too much demand is placed on some portion of the circuit distributing energy around a neighborhood. As misfortune would have it, the rush to electrify the cars we’ve come to depend upon is increasing the risk of overloads and outages in the years ahead if utilities can’t keep up.
Nowhere is the need for bolstering the grid as pronounced as it is in California. A new study reveals that, as the state chases its audacious goal of ensuring that every new vehicle sold from 2035 on plugs into an outlet, Golden State energy providers will need to perform extensive upgrades to the circuits that shuttle energy around cities. By 2045, California’s three major utilities will need to expand their combined distribution capacity by 25 gigawatts. The researchers found that these upgrades could cost $6 billion to $20 billion for the transformers and other hardware alone. Despite the expense, it will likely benefit, not burden, everyone who uses electricity.
“According to our study, actually, there will be a decrease in electricity price,” said Yanning Li, a doctoral student with a focus on energy systems at the University of California, Davis and the study’s lead author.
Li and her co-author found that the increase in energy consumption — and the revenue that would generate — will exceed the cost of the upgrades and ultimately reduce rates by up to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Energy in California currently costs, on average, just over 31 cents per kilowatt-hour. Yet, in a report with findings aligned with Li’s study, the California Public Utilities Commission pointed out that, depending on how much utilities spend on things like renewables and transmission capacity, the price customers pay could stay the same or even inch upward. Li also acknowledged that many factors may complicate how energy prices change for customers, including energy efficiency programs and rooftop solar.
A shortage of new transformers that plagued the industry even before the pandemic shuddered the entire supply chain complicates the price picture further. As a result of these challenges, “you can see utility lead times go up from an order of months to a year or two plus, and prices going up by a factor of five or greater,” said Killian McKenna, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who specializes in the distribution grid. If transformer costs continue rising as EV adoption pushes more utilities to consider upgrading their grids, then the overall outlay will grow as well — something Li notes in her study.
In the face of long waits and high prices, options exist that can ease the pace and extent of upgrades required to manage increasing loads, said Kristin Eberhard, the senior policy director at Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrification.
One option is to provide customers with incentives to shift the time or location of charging in a way that reduces peak demand — something Li discusses in her study. This can mean a driver choosing to charge at work instead of at home, or it can mean that, if a utility increases or decreases its energy prices depending on real-time supply and demand data, EV owners can program their car to charge when the rate drops below a prescribed level.
Utilities also can leverage big data. About a decade ago, in preparation for the surge in electric vehicles, Burbank Water and Power, a Los Angeles-area utility, developed a smart grid that allowed it to monitor its equipment with a high level of precision and accuracy, detect potential outages before they occur, and identify other sources of inefficiency and vulnerability. Noticing that some transformers saw significantly less demand than they were designed for while others were chronically taxed to their limits, the utility systematically shuffled components to right-size its distribution system, making it one of the most reliable in the nation. While not a permanent solution, such a project can certainly buy time for the supply chain to catch up with demand.
Of course, while a rapid growth in EV adoption across California and the 14 states that have adopted its EV mandate creates a new and growing source of energy demand, these plug-in vehicles are by no means the only reason distribution networks must be upgraded, which is why the California Public Utilities Commission expects the current plans for distribution maintenance to be able to keep up with the growth in demand from EV charging. Utilities need to perform line maintenance because America’s energy infrastructure has aged. And in some places, power lines need to be buried to make them more resilient and to reduce wildfire risk. But these concurrent dilemmas present an opportunity.
“You can imagine if you have old infrastructure that needs to be put underground and needs to be modernized at the same time that you expand the network, there’s a lot of opportunities for cost savings there,” McKenna said. “And that’s the big opportunity piece that I think folks need to look at.”
The planet just had its hottest April ever recorded, extending a streak of 11 consecutive record-setting months, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
The monthly bulletin from C3S said the average global temperature was 1.61 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average — the highest for a 12-month period. It was also 0.73 degrees Celsius above the average from 1991 to 2020.
“El Niño peaked at the beginning of the year and the sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are now going back towards neutral conditions. However, whilst temperature variations associated with natural cycles like El Niño come and go, the extra energy trapped into the ocean and the atmosphere by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will keep pushing the global temperature towards new records,” said C3S Director Carlo Buontempo in the report.
For months, ocean surface temperatures broke records as well, leading scientists to ask whether a tipping point due to human activity had been reached, reported Reuters.
“I think many scientists have asked the question whether there could be a shift in the climate system,” said Julien Nicolas, senior climate scientist at C3S, as Reuters reported.
Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth research scientist, has estimated that there is a 66 percent chance this year will be the hottest ever recorded, and a 99 percent likelihood of it being the second hottest, reported CNN. Hausfather added that the best estimate is that the global average temperature for 2024 will be a little higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Regions in eastern Europe had temperatures that were the most above average for April 2024, the C3S report said. Iceland and Fennoscandia saw temperatures that were below average.
Other than Europe, most of Africa, parts of South America, eastern Asia, Greenland, the northern and northeastern portions of North America and the northwestern parts of the Middle East saw temperatures that were the most above average for the month.
“The El Niño in the eastern equatorial Pacific continued to weaken towards neutral conditions, but marine air temperatures in general remained at an unusually high level,” C3S said. “This is the thirteenth month in a row that the SST [(sea surface temperature)] has been the warmest in the ERA5 data record for the respective month of the year.”
While the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement has not been officially overshot — the target refers to an average temperature for the planet over a period of decades — some scientists think the goal is already out of reach and that governments should be focusing on reducing carbon emissions as quickly as possible, Reuters reported.
“At what point do we declare we’ve lost the battle to keep temperatures below 1.5? My personal opinion is we’ve already lost that battle, and we really need to think very seriously about keeping below 2C and reducing our emissions as fast as we can,” said Newcastle University climate scientist Hayley Fowler, as reported by Reuters.
According to Ember’s executive summary of the report, record solar and wind construction in 2023 means “a new era of falling fossil generation is imminent.”
“The renewables future has arrived,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s global insights director. “Solar, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible.”
The report pointed out that, while electricity demand worldwide has continued to rise, renewables have helped slow fossil fuel growth by nearly two-thirds in the past decade, The Guardian reported.
The report found that green energy had increased from 19 percent of the power supply in 2000. The main contributor to the growth was solar, which added more than twice the generation of new electricity as coal last year. Solar’s surge was the fastest for the 19th year in a row and the biggest new electricity source again after surpassing wind power last year.
“The decline of power sector emissions is now inevitable. 2023 was likely the pivot point — peak emissions in the power sector — a major turning point in the history of energy. But the pace of emissions falls depends on how fast the renewables revolution continues,” Jones said, according to Ember.
The report looked at power data from 215 countries. The analysis included the latest data from 2023 for 80 countries that represented 92 percent of electricity demand around the globe. It also examined data for 13 economic and geographic groupings like the European Union, Asia, Africa and the Group of Seven largest developed economies in the world.
At the United Nations COP28 climate change conference at the end of 2023, world leaders set a target of reaching 60 percent of global electricity being supplied by clean energy by 2030. The goal would mean countries would have to triple their current renewables capacity in the coming six years, reported The Guardian.
“The good news is we already know the key enablers that help countries unleash the full potential of solar and wind. There’s an unprecedented opportunity for countries that choose to be at the forefront of the clean energy future. Expanding clean electricity not only helps to decarbonise the power sector. It also provides the step up in supply needed to electrify the whole economy; and that’s the real game-changer for the climate,” Jones said in Ember’s summary of the report.
Ember added that global power generation’s carbon dioxide intensity fell to 12 percent below its peak in 2007 — a new record low.
“The speed of solar and wind expansion is remarkable and a sign that society can bring about rapid change,” said Niklas Höhne, a climate scientist with the NewClimate Institute, who did not contribute to Ember’s research, as CNN reported.
Drought conditions caused a record fall in the generation of hydropower to a five year low, Ember said. The shortfall was met by a rise in coal power generation. Nearly all — 95 percent — of the increase in coal generation last year was in four drought-stricken countries: India, China, Vietnam and Mexico.
Ember’s forecast was for fossil fuel generation to “fall slightly” this year, but for the decrease to grow in subsequent years.
Ember said electricity demand growth was expected to be higher this year, but that the increase in green energy generation was predicted to be even greater, resulting in a reduction in global fossil fuel production of two percent.
“The decade ahead will see the energy transition enter a new phase,” Ember said. “Clean electricity additions – led by solar and wind – are already forecast to outpace demand growth in the coming decade, securing moderate reductions in fossil fuel use and hence emissions, even as demand accelerates to meet the growing needs of electrification and other booming technologies.”
Ember said green power was key to the decarbonization of heating, transportation and much of industry.
“An accelerating transition to a clean electrified economy powered by wind, solar and other forms of clean energy will also unlock benefits in areas such as economic growth, jobs, air quality and energy sovereignty,” Ember said.
Nancy Haegel, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory research advisor, told CNN that, while the report “does provide hope,” the question was whether the transition to renewables would happen quickly enough.
“Choices in the next 10 years are critical,” Haegel said.
Scientists have reclassified what was the last remaining glacier in Venezuela to an ice field, following significant shrinkage. The reclassification means that Venezuela is believed to be the first Andean country, and the first country globally, to lose all of its glaciers.
The Humboldt glacier, or La Corona, had been the only remaining glacier in Venezuela since 2011. By that year, five other glaciers in Venezuela had been lost, The Guardian reported.
As of 1910, Venezuela was home to six glaciers, which spanned about 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), IFL Science reported. But over time, amid global warming, the glaciers have shrunk until they no longer met the criteria to be classified as a glacier. Typically, a glacier is considered to be at least 10 hectares.
In the case of the Humboldt glacier, it shrank from an initial 450 hectares to only 2 hectares, as Phys.org reported.
“In Venezuela there are no more glaciers,” Julio Cesar Centeno, professor at the University of the Andes (ULA), told AFP in March 2024. “What we have is a piece of ice that is 0.4 percent of its original size.”
By the end of 2023, the government announced plans to slow thawing of the Humboldt glacier by covering it in sheets of polypropylene plastic. However, scientists are planning to ask Venezuela’s highest court to overturn the project due to concerns over microplastics and their impacts on what remains of the ice and the surrounding environment.
“These microplastics are practically invisible, they end up in the soil and from there they go to crops, lagoons, into the air, so people will end up eating and breathing that,” Centeno told AFP.
Scientists originally believed the glacier would last at least another 10 years before being reclassified, but political turmoil and the glacier’s remote location put observations on hold in recent years, The Guardian reported.
From the previous observations in 2019 to the following observations at the end of 2023, scientists discovered the glacier had lost about 2 hectares.
“Other countries lost their glaciers several decades ago after the end of the little ice age but Venezuela is arguably the first one to lose them in modern times,” said Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian, as reported by The Guardian.
Now, experts believe what remains of what was the Humboldt glacier will disappear entirely in five years at best, or two years at worse.
In addition to impacting local ecosystems, the disappearing ice is also expected to affect tourism in Venezuela. The ice cover of the country’s second highest mountain, Pico Humboldt, was a big draw for visitors.
“Now everything is rock, and what remains is so deteriorated that it is risky to step on it,” Susana Rodriguez, a forestry engineer, told AFP. “There are cracks.”
