France is weighing whether to implement penalty fees that fast fashion companies would have to pay per item sold as a way to offset the environmental impact of the industry.

Members of parliament (MPs) in France proposed a bill that would charge up to 50% of the selling price of fast fashion items to brands like Shein, which was named in the bill, and Temu. The bill noted that Shein alone has more than 470,000 products available, with more than 7,200 new items daily, Reuters reported.

“This evolution of the apparel sector towards ephemeral fashion, combining increased volumes and low prices, is influencing consumer buying habits by creating buying impulses and a constant need for renewal, which is not without environmental, social and economic consequences,” the bill said.

As of 2019, 43% of surveyed shoppers in France said they typically purchased their clothing from fast fashion retailers, according to Statista. The second-highest responses were online second-hand shops and brick-and-mortar thrift stores, each at 8%.

As a response, and in an effort toward a more circular economy as outlined in the AGEC law passed in 2020, lawmakers in France have proposed charging fast fashion companies up to 10 euros (about $10.87) per fast fashion item sold or up to 50% of the selling price, with penalties going into effect by 2030.

Last year, France began offering financial incentive for citizens to repair their own clothing. The initiative allowed citizens to claim between 6 and 25 euros (about $6.52 to $27.17) on the cost of repairs completed by certified repair professionals, The Guardian reported.

The former measure, which kicked off in October 2023, coupled with the consideration of new penalties for fast fashion retailers is meant to curb the amount of clothing waste in the country. As reported by The Guardian, people throw out about 700,000 metric tons of clothing in France each year, and about 66% of that waste is sent to landfills.

The fast fashion penalty fees will be discussed by a parliamentary committee, then presented to parliament in late March, Reuters reported.

According to Christophe Béchu, Minister for Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion of France, there will be additional proposals to curb the negative environmental impacts of the fashion industry, including a potential ban on ultra-fast fashion advertising and financial incentives to lower the cost of sustainable clothing while increasing the cost of ultra-fast fashion items.

The post France Considers Penalties on Fast Fashion Companies to Offset Their Environmental Impact appeared first on EcoWatch.

Do you leave your electronics in standby mode? Computer monitors, printers, shredders, televisions — anything…

The post We Earthlings: Standby Mode Wastes Energy appeared first on Earth911.

This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising electricity bills to developing renewable energy.  

On a Tuesday morning in January, college student Aurora Gray stepped up to the podium in a windowless room in Atlanta, around the corner from the state capitol building. In front of her sat a five-member panel of elected officials that oversees how and where nearly every Georgia resident gets their power.

“The generation of energy… using fossil fuels has become an existential threat to our safety due to the undisputed impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on our planet,” Gray told the commission. “We must act now, as later is way too late.”

More than a dozen other students sat behind her, awaiting their allotted three minutes in front of the Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC. One after another, they called on the commission to reject a request from Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, to add new natural gas capacity to the grid. Instead, they repeated at the podium, the company needs to expand renewable energy and take other steps to combat climate change.

“You can help get Georgia Power to take the right actions in the essential timeframe,” said high school senior Evelyn Ford, the last of the students to speak across two days. “Actually, you’re the only five people in Georgia who can.”

Ford is substantially correct. Though Georgia’s state legislature can pass laws on clean energy and the governor can issue executive orders on climate action, the Public Service Commission is the only government body with direct authority to regulate whatever Georgia Power does. The panel sets the rates people pay for electricity and approves the utility’s plans to make or buy that power and deliver it to customers. According to the commission’s own website, “Very few governmental agencies have as much impact on people’s lives as the PSC.” 

There is a small panel of regulators in every state that holds a similar power over electricity generation and, by extension, an enormous segment of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. By setting electricity prices, they also have a substantial impact on most people’s lives and pocketbooks. Yet, in Georgia and elsewhere, these groups — known as public service or public utility commissions — get little attention or scrutiny outside of energy wonk circles. Their hearings and documents tend to be long and jargon-heavy, covered in the media by a small group of specialized reporters, making it hard to engage with the process. 

This year, Grist and WABE will try to demystify energy regulation in Georgia and beyond. We’ll bring you stories on not only how your power gets made, but how those decisions happen — and how residents who vote and pay electricity bills can get involved. 

How the Georgia PSC makes decisions

The Georgia Public Service Commission was established in 1879, first as a government body to regulate railroads and later expanded to address the services popping up in an increasingly electrified and connected state. Today, the PSC oversees investor-owned utilities, as well as natural gas pipelines and telecommunications. 

Georgia has 42 member-owned cooperatives and 52 municipalities that provide electric service to residents. But Georgia Power is by far the state’s largest electricity provider, serving 2.7 million customers, from the Tennessee border to the coastal islands. It is also Georgia’s only investor-owned electric utility — meaning it is the only power company whose rates and operations the PSC directly oversees. For most Georgia Power power customers, it’s their only option to buy electricity.

At the core of the commission’s oversight of Georgia Power are two main decision-making processes: the integrated resource plan and the rate case.

Every three years, the utility updates its 20-year plan for making and delivering electricity, the IRP. This involves forecasting how much power Georgians will need and laying out what combination of resources — coal and gas plants, nuclear energy, solar fields, hydroelectric dams, and purchase agreements with other utilities — Georgia Power will use to meet that demand. It also evaluates anticipated updates and maintenance to the company’s system of transmission lines, transformers, and other infrastructure that delivers power.

As of 2022, the last time the PSC approved an IRP, Georgia Power still got its energy mostly from fossil fuels: 48 percent natural gas and oil, 15 percent coal. Nuclear energy accounted for another 23 percent, with 7 percent coming from renewables — mostly solar — and 2 percent from hydropower.

The rate case determines how much Georgia Power’s customers pay for this electricity. In addition to the base cost of power, the company is allowed to pass on to customers the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure approved in the IRP, as long as the PSC signs off on it. Throughout the construction of new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, for example, customers have paid an added fee of up to 10 percent, $3.88 to $7.97 for the typical customer, every month to cover the costs of financing the project. 

As an investor-owned company, Georgia Power also aims to make a profit; the commission decides how much it can make by setting a figure in the rate case called “return on equity.”

That last point is often a particularly contentious one. The commission, by its own description, “must balance Georgia citizens’ need for reliable services and reasonable rates with the need for utilities to earn a reasonable return on investment.” 

But the company’s profits rankle many Georgians who face a high energy burden, meaning they spend a high proportion of their income on energy. Atlanta ranks fourth in the country for its median energy burden, and third for energy burden among low-income households. 

“Tell them they make enough profit,” former Democratic state Senator Vincent Fort urged the commission during Georgia Power’s last rate case. “Tell them that you are standing up for regular folk.”

There are a lot of opportunities for input before the Public Service Commission decides on IRPs and rate cases. Along with public commenters like Fort and the group of students last month, a subset of PSC employees, known as the Public Interest Advocacy staff, advocate for ratepayers’ interests in the hearings. Other organizations, including environmental and consumer advocacy groups, major electricity buyers, and cities, can engage in the hearings as well. These stakeholders and the Public Interest Advocacy staff present expert testimony and cross-examine one another’s witnesses as well as Georgia Power’s representatives.

Often, the commission’s Public Interest Advocacy staff strikes a deal with Georgia Power that resolves most of the issues in an IRP proceeding or rate case. But the final decision ultimately rests with the five commissioners, who can approve or deny an agreement and can amend it before voting.

How the Georgia PSC’s decisions relate to climate change

The PSC has the authority to alter Georgia Power’s business proposals and dictate its energy mix — thereby significantly controlling the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, they already have. In 2011, commissioner Bubba McDonald added 50 megawatts of solar power to Georgia Power’s generation mix. When the utility updated its long-range plan for power generation, known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP, in 2013, the commission more than doubled the solar capacity that Georgia Power asked for. In subsequent IRPs, which happen every three years, the commission continued to order more solar than the utility proposed. By 2023, the state ranked seventh in the country for solar power. Georgia’s emissions dropped by 5 percent from 2017 to 2021, and power generation dropped below transportation as the leading emissions source. Researchers credit the change largely to the solar growth that the commission mandated.

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But the PSC has also upheld and prolonged fossil fuel energy generation in Georgia. In the utility’s most recent IRP, in 2022, the commission approved six agreements to purchase natural gas power for more than a decade into the future over the objections of consumer and clean energy advocates. The utility also sought to shutter several coal plants in its latest long-term plan, the 2022 IRP, saying they would soon no longer be economical to run — but the PSC put off a decision on one of them, meaning the facility will keep burning coal for the foreseeable future. 

How the PSC is elected

Five elected members sit on Georgia’s Public Service Commission. Each member represents a district, where they’re required to live, but elections for the positions are statewide. 

While some city offices have similar arrangements, this is an unusual system at the state level. Georgia lawmakers devised it in the late 1990s, with the idea, according to its architects, that it would reflect the commission’s unique job regulating a statewide industry that has local impacts. Former Georgia House Speaker Terry Coleman told WABE that lawmakers wanted to figure out “how we could make sure that places outside of the metro areas had representation.”

But civil rights and environmental activists contend that because the commissioners are chosen in a statewide vote, they don’t really represent the people in their districts. The commissioner for District 3, covering Metro Atlanta, for instance, is elected not just by Atlanta residents but by voters in rural South Georgia and the mountains of North Georgia — areas with starkly different demographics, politics, and needs. A recent lawsuit by a group of Black voters in Atlanta found that this system violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting their votes, preventing them from seating the candidate of their choice on the commission.

“Representation matters,” plaintiff Brionté McCorkle, executive director of the group Georgia Conservation Voters, told WABE. “It’s the most important thing to have at least one person on the commission that represents the unique and particularized needs of your district.” 

The Georgia Secretary of State’s office argued during the lawsuit that the advantage the PSC voting system creates is political, not racial. This is a key distinction, because while the Voting Rights Act bans racial gerrymandering, the Supreme Court has held that election systems that favor a political party are allowed.

All of the current commissioners are Republicans. Most remain supportive of natural gas – serving on gas industry boards or promoting it in the press. In a state where a third of residents are Black, only two Black commissioners have ever served on the commission during its 145-year history, both of them appointed to fill vacancies. Four of the five the current commissioners were initially appointed to fill vacancies before running for reelection as incumbents.

Siding with the plaintiffs in 2022, a federal judge blocked that year’s elections for two seats on the commission and ordered that the system be redesigned. But the 12th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision last year. A further appeal hasn’t been filed yet, but the plaintiffs have said they’re exploring options.

In the meantime, the commissioners who were up for reelection in 2022, Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, continue to sit and vote on the commission. Another commissioner, Tricia Pridemore, is due to face reelection this year. But none of those races are scheduled for 2024 as the election case hangs in limbo. 

How other state energy regulators work

While these policies and procedures are specific to Georgia, some version of them plays out all over the country.

Every state has a public service or public utility commission that controls electricity. In 10 states, utility regulators are elected directly by ballot. In the remaining 40, they’re appointed by other elected officials, like the governor or state legislature. Many, though not all, states require their utilities to file IRPs that predict future demand for power and map out how the utility will meet that need. 

What’s common nationwide is that the future of clean energy hinges on the decisions of these public utility commissions. Cities, states, and companies can resolve to cut emissions, but if they buy power from a regulated utility they don’t ultimately control how their power is made; the regulators do. Even the Department of Defense, with its $800 billion budget, is subject to the decisions of these commissions.

Utilities’ own climate change goals, too, depend on these commissions. Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company, has announced plans to shutter most of its coal plants, but that plan can only move forward if approved by utility commissioners. Similarly, regulators approve or deny plans to build solar and wind farms, nuclear plants, and battery storage facilities. Elect or appoint commissioners who don’t prioritize clean energy and climate goals set by companies or governments have little chance of succeeding. 

As Americans concerned about climate change, environmental justice, and energy affordability look for ways to make an impact, public utility regulators often go unnoticed as powerful decision makers who could change the course of U.S. emissions — if they choose to act. 

Grist and WABE’s reporting over the next year aims to examine these commissions and their outsized role in American households and climate policy. To ensure our stories reach and involve residents who face the biggest barriers to accessing accurate, consistent information, we are hosting workshops with community partners, creating printable resources, and launching a paid journalism training program.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Want clean electricity? These are the overlooked elected officials who get to decide. on Mar 5, 2024.

This glossary is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small, but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about electricity bills to energy production. It is meant to help you better understand the acronyms and terms used by elected officials, utility companies, and media outlets. 

Utility Commissions 

Terms that are key to understanding how state utility regulators make decisions about electricity affordability and energy sources.

Public Service Commission (PSC): A public agency tasked with regulating utilities. The format of these boards varies by state: some are elected, some are appointed, and their rules and responsibilities differ. In addition to PSCs, they are called a Public Utilities Commission, a Board of Public Utilities, or something similar. In Georgia, the PSC is a five-member elected body that regulates the main electric utility, Georgia Power, as well as natural gas pipelines and telecommunications.

Rate: The price per unit of electricity. As of February 2024, the average retail rate in Georgia is 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. Public utility commissions generally have final approval of these numbers for investor-owned utilities. You can find your state’s rate via the Energy Information Administration.

Rate Structure/Tariff: The combination of the rate, additional fees, and other considerations that make up power bills. In addition to the rate for the actual power used, Georgia Power customers pay fees or riders for fuel costs, sales tax, nuclear construction financing, and other costs..

Ratepayer: A customer of an electric provider who pays rates for electricity. There are a variety of rates and rate structures because the costs for a resident, a small business, and a large factory vary.

Integrated Resource Plan (IRP): An electric provider’s long-range plan for generating and delivering electricity. In Georgia, it’s a 20-year plan updated every three years with input from the PSC and stakeholders, which are called intervenors.

Rate Case: The process of setting the rates an electric utility charges customers for the power they use. In Georgia, this happens every three years following the IRP.

Intervenor: A stakeholder or advocacy group that files for and is granted permission to weigh in on a power company’s plans in front of regulators. These include consumer and environmental advocates, major power purchasers like corporations and transit authorities, cities, federal agencies, and representatives of industries (i.e. solar). In Georgia, these groups have the ability to cross-examine Georgia Power’s representatives before the PSC and put forward their own witnesses to weigh in on the company’s proposals.

Investor-owned utility (IOU): A private company providing electricity to customers and owned by shareholders. These are the electric utilities regulated by PSCs. Nearly two-thirds of electric customers in the U.S. get their power from an investor-owned utility.

Publicly owned utility: A utility that is run as a division of local government. Residents pay a city, state, or municipal agency, rather than a private company like Georgia Power. These are not subject to the PSC in Georgia except for territorial disputes.

Electric cooperatives: Public utilities that are owned by their customers. Cooperatives are supposed to have more flexibility and be accountable to members’ feedback. After bills are paid, leftover money should be returned to members and/or used to invest in communities. Cooperatives were established to bring power to rural areas; there are over 900 of them in the U.S. 

Energy 

These terms are often used by energy and utility companies, renewable energy advocates, and regulators. 

Megawatt (MW): A unit of power that measures how much energy a large resource, like a power plant or solar field, generates. One megawatt (MW) is one million watts. Georgia’s new nuclear reactor, for example, Plant Vogtle Unit 3, can generate just over 1,000 MW, which Georgia Power estimates is enough to power 500,000 homes and businesses.

Kilowatt-hour (kWh): A measure of the amount of energy expended over an hour. This is the unit used to track power usage and billing. The average U.S. electricity customer uses just under 900 kWh per month.

Supply-side: The process of generating electricity and getting it to customers. Power plants, solar panels, and wind turbines are all supply side resources. Sometimes this is called “front-of-the-meter.”

Demand-side: A process that reduces the amount of electricity consumers need, such as improving energy efficiency or installing solar panels. It is sometimes called “behind-the-meter.”

Demand response: An approach that seeks to reduce the overall amount of energy needed by offering incentives for customers to move their power use to off-peak hours. Utilities often use this approach to avoid blackouts during periods of extremely high demand, such as when it’s extremely cold or hot and heat or air conditioning use is up.

Renewable energy: Energy generated from the wind, sun, and the heat below the Earth’s surface (geothermal). These are considered “renewable” because no amount of use depletes them, whereas the amount of fossil fuels is finite. 

Clean or carbon-free energy: Electricity generated without burning fossil fuels. The term is often used interchangeably with “renewable energy,” even though they are distinct. Carbon-free includes nuclear energy and biomass energy, the burning of wood products, which is often classified by governments as carbon-neutral because trees are replanted (though that is contentious because regrowth takes so long).

Distributed energy resource: An energy source that generates electricity closer to where people actually consume power rather than at a centralized location like a power plant or solar field. Rooftop solar panels, storage batteries, or an electric vehicle used to power a home are some examples of these “off-the-grid” solutions. 

Photovoltaic (PV) cells: The technology that makes up most solar panels. PV cells, often known as solar cells, convert sunlight directly into electricity. Read more about how solar works here.

Utility-scale solar: Large arrays of many solar panels that provide electricity to the grid. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) defines these as projects that generate more than one megawatt, though utility-scale solar projects are often much larger.

Community solar: Local solar energy projects that allow nearby residents or businesses to pool resources to access renewable energy otherwise too expensive or logistically difficult as an individual household. This model makes solar more accessible to low-to-moderate income people, as well as renters or residents of multi-tenant buildings.

Rooftop solar: Solar panels installed on the roof of a home or business. These power the building they’re on while the sun is shining, but customers are still typically tied to their local utility. They buy electricity from their utility during periods of low solar production, such as at night,  as well as sell electricity back to the utility during periods of high production.

Net metering: A billing arrangement set up between the owner of a rooftop solar array and a power company that accounts for the customer’s need to buy power from the grid and sell back to the grid. This term is often used interchangeably with “monthly netting” or “annual netting.”

Instantaneous netting: An arrangement under which the utility buys excess power from a rooftop solar array as it’s generated, at a predetermined rate that’s often less than the retail rate customers pay to buy grid power. This is the system used for most Georgia Power customers with rooftop solar panels.

Battery Energy Storage System (BESS): A battery that can store energy for later use, often paired with solar panels and other renewable resources. At the utility scale, they can make the electricity generated by a solar field available across more of the day.

Power Purchase Agreement (PPA): An agreement between companies, utilities, or municipalities for one entity to buy electricity from another. In some cases,  a third-party developer installs, owns, and operates an energy system (i.e. solar) on a customer’s property. In other instances, one utility purchases excess energy from another. Some states restrict non-utility providers from selling electricity. 

Energy efficiency: Using less energy to do the same job. For instance, a more energy-efficient air conditioner uses less power to cool the same space to the same temperature. Energy efficient upgrades, like LED light bulbs, typically lead to long-term cost savings. 

Weatherization: Changes that improve a building’s energy efficiency. For instance, windows that retain heat better, improved insulation, and weather stripping to close gaps can all reduce the amount of energy it takes to heat or cool a house. Many utilities, state governments, and nonprofits have weatherization programs to help low-income residents afford these upgrades.

Energy burden: The share of household income that goes toward paying energy bills. According to the Department of Energy, “the national average energy burden for low-income households is 8.6%, three times higher than for non-low-income households which is estimated at 3%. In some areas, depending on location and income, energy burden can be as high as 30%.” 

Energy affordability: The idea that people should be able to pay for their home electricity use while also paying for other basic living expenses without having to choose. 

Federal Laws

These laws impact climate action, renewable energy development, and how utilities operate. 

Inflation Reduction Act: A 2022 law often referred to as the largest piece of climate change legislation in U.S. history. The law includes billions of dollars in incentives for clean energy, energy efficiency, and other climate actions.

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law/Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: A 2021 law that, among other infrastructure investments, includes billions of dollars for electric grid upgrades and electric vehicle charging.

Voting Rights Act of 1965: The landmark law prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. A lawsuit brought by Black voters in Atlanta alleges that Georgia PSC elections violate the Voting Rights Act. Commissioners have to live in specific districts but are elected by a statewide vote, which the plaintiffs claim dilutes Black votes.

Georgia

These are specific programs, companies, and terms. 

Georgia Power: Georgia’s largest electric utility is a regulated monopoly, which means it is the only electricity provider available to its residential customers. Georgia Power is subject to oversight and ostensibly kept in check not by competition but by its regulators, the PSC. Georgia Power is a subsidiary of the publicly-traded Southern Company. 

Southern Company: One of the largest power companies in the U.S. and the parent company of Georgia Power, Alabama Power, Mississippi Power, Southern Nuclear (the operator of Plant Vogtle), several natural gas companies, and other subsidiaries.

Plant Vogtle: A four-reactor nuclear power plant near Augusta, Georgia. Two reactors have been operational for decades, but the construction of two new ones — Unit 3 and Unit 4 — began in 2009. Unit 3 entered service in 2023, and Unit 4 is due to come online in 2024. Both are years behind schedule, and the total price of the project more than doubled over the course of its construction. These are the first new nuclear reactors built in the U.S. in decades, and many industry analysts believe they’ll be the last of their size built due in part to the lengthy and expensive Vogtle construction process. Georgia Power owns the largest share of the new reactors.

Public Interest Advocacy staff: Staffers of the Georgia PSC charged with representing the interests of ratepayers before the commission. The PIA Staff often ends up negotiating agreements with Georgia Power and some intervenors that adjust the terms the company initially asked for; it is typically these agreements that the PSC ultimately votes on.

Stipulated Agreement: An agreement between parties, usually pending final approval by the commission. In Georgia, this refers to an agreement usually between the PIA Staff and Georgia Power, sometimes including or endorsed by some of the intervenors. Often called “stips,” they typically include some alterations to the company’s original request based on criticisms and concerns raised during expert testimony. The parties sometimes leave specific points open for the commissioners to decide, and the commissioners can amend the agreements before approving them. 

Electric Membership Cooperative (EMC): A member-owned utility that operates in many parts of Georgia, especially rural areas, outside of Georgia Power’s service area. These are not subject to the PSC except in matters of financing and territorial disputes, but instead to their own boards. Members can vote on those boards, in theory giving them a voice in the management of the EMC, though their level of input varies in practice.

Municipal Energy Authority of Georgia (MEAG): An organization that provides electricity to Georgia’s municipal energy providers. MEAG is a part-owner of the new reactors at Plant Vogtle.

Oglethorpe Power: An electric company that provides power to many of Georgia’s EMCs and is a co-owner of the new Plant Vogtle reactors.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your guide to electricity and energy policy in Georgia on Mar 5, 2024.

Wealthy investors and asset managers wield a lot of power over the major companies whose stock they own or control. Every year, shareholder advocacy groups hope to exert that power for good by filing shareholder resolutions — 500-word proposals that might ask companies to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, or to disclose more information on their resource use. 

Shareholders typically vote on resolutions between April and June during a period known as “proxy season,” named after the proxy statements that companies distribute to investors ahead of their annual shareholder meetings. These votes aren’t binding, but they can influence companies’ decisions and generate press around a particular issue.

This year, activist investors are notching wins even before the beginning of proxy season. Shareholder advocacy groups have already extracted a handful of plastics-related concessions from major companies — including the entertainment behemoth Disney, the food processing giant Hormel, and Choice Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in the world. The companies’ new commitments include reporting on and reducing the amount of plastics they use in their packaging, as well as more closely monitoring hazardous plastic additives.

Activist investment firms like Green Century Capital Management — which manages over $1 billion in assets — must make a business case for environmental action. Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate at Green Century Capital Management who helped negotiate the agreements with Disney and Choice Hotels, said the new commitments show that companies are waking up to the threat that single-use plastics pose to their bottom line. Between the prospect of more stringent state regulations, new lawsuits against plastic producers, and a global plastics treaty being negotiated by the United Nations, plastics are facing some potentially severe regulatory and reputational prospects over the coming years.

“It’s unnerving investors,” Guernsey said, and the scale of the problem is “just starting to dawn on corporate managers.”

The companies’ pledges also shed light on the shareholder advocacy strategy, which is not necessarily to sway companies through voting on shareholder resolutions, but to use the prospect of a vote as a negotiating tool. According to Guernsey, shareholder advocates almost always prefer to reach an agreement with companies through dialogue — they only file a resolution if they feel that it’s needed to keep the conversation going. In some cases, after a resolution is filed, companies agree to make some kind of commitment in exchange for the resolution’s withdrawal.

That’s essentially what happened with Hormel. A nonprofit shareholder advocacy organization called As You Sow started talking to the company last fall, asking them to take more responsibility for plastic packaging after their products are sold to customers. As You Sow organizes investors and asset managers around a range of social and environmental issues, and it persuaded investors holding nearly $2 trillion in shares to vote for the 48 resolutions it introduced in 2023. Kelly McBee, As You Sow’s circular economy manager, said she had “productive conversations” with Hormel, but she still wanted to see more support for laws that make companies financially responsible for the trash they produce (known as “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, laws), as well as more investment in plastic collection and recycling infrastructure.

“That’s when we moved into the shareholder resolution phase,” McBee said. After As You Sow’s filing, Hormel came back to the table offering some additional plastics commitments, including a pledge to reduce its cumulative packaging use by 10 million pounds by 2030. It also agreed to form an industry working group to advance policies that make packaging more recyclable or reusable, and to publish by the end of 2024 a report on ways for Hormel to become a more circular company, meaning one that minimizes waste. As You Sow withdrew its shareholder resolution in response to the new commitments.

“Hormel was pretty great to work with, they seemed genuinely motivated,” McBee said. Back in 2021, As You Sow had given the company an F grade on its plastic pollution scorecard, in part due to a lack of transparency around its plastics use and poor support for plastic waste collection and management.

The commitments secured by Green Century followed a similar arc. After talks with Disney and Choice Hotels, Green Century filed shareholder resolutions and then withdrew them in exchange for corporate pledges to measure, report, and set new targets for reducing their plastics use. 

Disney had already been “ahead of the curve,” Guernsey said, with commitments to eliminate single-use plastics on its cruise ships by 2025 and to achieve zero-waste in its theme parks by 2030. But more measurement and reporting will increase transparency around the company’s progress. Choice Hotels had already committed to phase out single-use polystyrene foam packaging by the end of 2023 and transition to bulk shampoo and other amenities by 2025. But an organization-wide plastics inventory will now allow the chain to set its first overall reduction goal by early next year. 

Other commitments recently secured by Green Century and other investors include one from the retail chain Costco, which agreed in October to report plastics use across its Kirkland-branded products, and another from the beverage conglomerate Keurig Dr. Pepper, which agreed in January to restrict its suppliers from using certain bisphenols — a family of plastic additives linked to hormone disruption. Green Century is planning to unveil more plastic commitments — largely related to increasing disclosure and reducing plastics use — from about a dozen more companies in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, As You Sow has filed plastic-related shareholder resolutions at at least 14 other companies.

Not all negotiations between companies and shareholder advocates result in a mutual agreement, and resolutions that go to a vote can’t force a company’s hand. A 2023 resolution asking Amazon to reduce its plastic packaging, for instance, was largely ignored by the company despite receiving support from nearly half of its shareholders. “All votes on shareholder proposals are nonbinding,” McBee explained. “So even if 100 percent of shareholders vote on something, the company doesn’t have to take that action.”

Votes can still have indirect influence, though. If a company ignores the will of its shareholders, McBee said, they can sell their shares, reducing its valuation and access to capital. Companies that disregard shareholder resolutions might also make potential investors think twice about sinking their money into the company, or perhaps inspire lawmakers to write legislation forcing companies to take steps they won’t take voluntarily.

Still, many advocates question the power of shareholders to effect systemic change. Even after their most recent pledges, companies like Disney and Hormel will likely continue to be large plastic polluters — not to mention their other environmental impacts, like the emissions associated with Disney’s fossil fuel-powered cruise ships and Hormel’s industrial meat products. Some environmental groups pressure major investors to sell their shares in polluting companies rather than to try to change them from within. Others favor advocating for more stringent government regulations.

“[R]elying on shareholders to make corporations more accountable and socially responsible is misguided,” wrote Warren Staples, a former lecturer in social procurement at the University of Melbourne, and Andrew Linden, an corporate governance researcher at RMIT University, in a 2019 essay. “There are far more direct and systemically effective measures available to do that.”

Choice Hotels, Costco, Disney, Hormel, and Keurig Dr. Pepper did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Even shareholder advocates acknowledge their strategy’s limitations, including on plastics. Globally, two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic enter the ocean every minute, and plastics and petrochemical companies are planning to make even more of the material over the coming decades. To rein in the plastics problem, Guernsey said, “overall regulation is going to be important” — especially standardized requirements for companies to disclose and report their plastics use, as well as more EPR legislation and bans on particular types of plastic.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Under pressure from activist investors, big brands agree to report and reduce plastics use on Mar 5, 2024.

In late 2023, some countries were already experiencing a delay in the start to ski season because of warmer than usual temperatures. Now, a new study has outlined just how much money ski resorts in the U.S. are losing as global warming leads to a loss of snow and shorter ski seasons.

The study authors modeled 226 ski areas in four regional ski markets in the U.S. to predict what the country’s ski industry may look like without influences from climate change, such as a loss of snow and the need to make artificial snow, as well as what ski seasons could look like in the future.

According to the study, which was published in the journal Current Issues in Tourism, the average ski season in the U.S. from 2000 to 2019 was shortened by about 5.5 to 7.1 days, even with supplemental snowmaking, compared to the average ski season from 1960 to 1979.

“Climate change is an evolving business reality for the ski industry and the tourism sector. The record-breaking temperatures this winter provided a preview of the future,” Daniel Scott, co-author of the study and a professor at the Department of Geography and Environmental Management of the University of Waterloo in Canada, said in a statement. “It tested the limits of snowmaking in many areas and altered millions of skiers’ ski visits and destination choices.”

Because of the shortened ski seasons and the need to make artificial snow to supplement lower amounts of natural snow, the researchers estimated the costs to total around $252 million per year. As The Guardian reported, this amounts to an estimated $5 billion in losses for ski resorts over the 20-year timeframe.

The authors noted that these cost estimates may be lower than reality, too, because they only factored in direct losses from fewer visitors and higher costs for snowmaking. The study’s calculations did not include estimates for losses from fewer hotel stays, retail spending and other operational costs.

“We are probably past the era of peak ski seasons,” Scott said. “Average ski seasons in all U.S. regional markets are projected to get shorter in the decades ahead under all emission futures. How much shorter depends on the ability of all countries to deliver on their Paris Climate Agreement emission reduction commitments and whether global warming temperatures are held below two degrees Celsius.”

According to the study, ski seasons could decrease by 14 to 33 days in a low-emissions scenario, or the average ski season may be 27 to 62 days shorter with continued high emissions. In total, this could lead to an estimated $657 million to $1.352 billion in losses for the U.S. ski industry per year.

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For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.

This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.

Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries. 

“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.

It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.” 

The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’” 

The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.

Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050. 

That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population. 

“The prospects for reversing inequality in all countries will be far greater when the overall economy is growing,” writes Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The good news is that at least some decoupling has been happening on a global scale for decades. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, but not quite as fast as gross domestic product, or GDP — the value of all goods and services produced in a given area. This type of decoupling is described as “relative” or “weak.” As the IEA has noted, the tight link between climate pollution and economic activity “has loosened” in every region of the world except for parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. 

But the kind of decoupling needed to achieve international climate targets is called “absolute” decoupling, when economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions veer in opposite directions: GDP up, emissions down. More recent research has documented this in a number of high-income countries. The U.S., for example, saw a 32 percent increase in GDP between 2005 and 2021, while its overall CO2 emissions fell by about 17 percent.

Something similar appears to have happened in other developed economies like France, Sweden, and Germany — even when you account for so-called “consumption-based” emissions, which include emissions from the production of goods that are imported or exported. In other words, these countries seem to really be reducing climate pollution and not just offshoring it to the developing world. Since 2016, reports from the World Resources Institute, the Breakthrough Institute, and independent researchers have shown more and more countries achieving periods of absolute decoupling, including their consumption-based emissions. Perhaps the splashiest analysis came in 2022, when a Financial Times data columnist reported that 70 countries — one in three worldwide — had experienced at least five consecutive years of absolute decoupling between 1990 and 2020.

“Green growth is already here,” the columnist wrote.

Some experts have raised questions about the data used to make these claims — GDP, for instance, can be measured in different ways that affect decoupling calculations, and country-level emissions data typically excludes major pollution sources like aviation and methane leaks from uncapped oil wells. Research led by Haberl — the largest literature review to date on the empirical evidence for absolute decoupling — suggests that only countries experiencing an economic crisis have successfully reduced their emissions, and that evidence for an inverse relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions is “seldom found.” But there’s a general consensus among economists that at least some amount of absolute decoupling has occurred in a handful of countries. In a study published last year in The Lancet Planetary Health, even green growth skeptics found evidence of absolute decoupling in 11 of the world’s highest-income countries.

“Everyone should be cheering about this,” Kate Raworth, a heterodox economist and professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, told Grist. 

This leads to more nuanced questions, not about whether decoupling is possible — at least for individual countries — but whether currently observed trends can be extrapolated out to create a climate-safe future for the entire planet. In other words, can decoupling happen fast enough to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement?

One simple way to look at it is to take the rate of emissions reductions achieved in countries that have successfully decoupled, and see how long it would take for them to fully decarbonize. That’s essentially what Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel — researchers at the University of Leeds and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, respectively — did in the Lancet Planetary Health study. They found that, if 11 high-income countries continued their achieved rates of emissions reduction, it would take them more than 220 years to cut emissions by 95 percent — far longer than the net-zero-by-2050 timeline called for by climate experts.

“The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green,” the authors wrote. In an interview with Grist, Vogel likened optimism around gradual decoupling to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re slowing down,” while the Titanic races toward an iceberg.

Some economists argue that just because decoupling at the scale and speed necessary hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t. With enough investment in renewable energy and efficient clean technologies, they argue, economic growth can continue without the rise in emissions that has historically accompanied it. As noted by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, carbon-intensive sectors like electricity generation actually contribute relatively little to the world economy, compared to high-value but lower-emitting sectors like IT, real estate, and social work. 

According to Pollin, the University of Massachusetts economics professor, faster decoupling is simply a matter of money and political will. If policymakers invest 2.5 percent of global GDP each year, he said — about $4.5 trillion — then the world economy can completely decarbonize within 40 to 50 years, all while boosting GDP through the creation of tens of millions of new jobs in the clean energy industry. 

This plan would likely involve new policies to address renewable energy permitting challenges, boost energy efficiency for appliances and housing, and rein in global methane emissions — not to mention the urgent need to curtail the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry. Economic growth will be a natural byproduct of huge new investments in clean energy infrastructure, according to Pollin, and it will also be essential for creating new jobs for displaced fossil fuel workers and improving living conditions in developing countries. “There is simply no alternative,” he said.

Economists like Vogel and Hickel, however, draw a different conclusion. As long as countries pursue economic growth, they don’t believe world leaders will be able to zero out emissions fast enough to comply with international climate goals and principles of climate justice. According to their research, doing so would require, on average, a 10-fold increase in currently observed decoupling rates, which they consider to be “empirically out of reach.” They note that their conclusions are conservative because their data does not take into account emissions from agriculture, forestry, other land use, aviation, and shipping, and their projections assume that countries began adequate climate mitigation in 2023, which does not appear to have happened.

Other researchers have found that, even under aggressive climate mitigation policies, emissions relative to constant GDP growth can only decrease at a maximum rate of 3 percent per year. That’s only about a third of the decoupling rates that some experts say would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees C (2.7 or 3.6 degrees F). 

“Absolute decoupling is not sufficient to avoid consuming the remaining CO2 emission budget under the global warming limit of 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C and to avoid climate breakdown,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent assessment.

Instead of making growth greener, some economists call for a whole new economic paradigm to address converging social and ecological crises. They call it “post-growth,” referring to a reorientation away from GDP growth and toward other metrics, like human well-being and ecological sustainability. Essentially, they want to prioritize people and the planet and not care so much what the stock market is doing. This would more or less free countries from the decoupling dilemma, since it eliminates the growth imperative altogether.

Raworth, the professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, calls her version of the post-growth agenda “doughnut economics.” In this visual model, the inner ring of the doughnut represents the minimum amount of economic activity needed to satisfy  basic needs like access to food, water, and shelter. The outer ring signifies the upper limits of natural resource use that the Earth can sustain. The goal, she argues, is for economies to exist between the inner and outer rings of the doughnut, maintaining adequate living standards without surpassing planetary limits. 

“Our economies need to bring us into the doughnut,” Raworth told Grist. “Whether GDP grows needs to be a secondary concern.” 

Vogel and Hickel go a little further. They call for a planned, deliberate reduction of carbon- or energy-intensive production and consumption in high-income countries, a concept known as “degrowth.” The rationale is that much of the energy and resources used in high-income countries goes toward carbon-intensive products that don’t contribute to human welfare, like industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets. Tamping down this “less necessary” consumption could slash greenhouse gas emissions, while lower energy demand could make it more feasible to build and maintain enough energy infrastructure. Some research suggests that reducing energy demand could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C without relying on unproven technologies to draw carbon out of the atmosphere.

Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit. 

“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.

Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.

Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality. 

“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”

They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt. 

Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”

This article has been updated to better reflect Vogel and Hickel’s definition of degrowth, and to clarify their position that countries can’t pursue economic growth and decarbonize fast enough to comply with international climate targets and principles of climate justice.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t. on Mar 4, 2024.

When you fill up your tank and drive away from a gas station, is the resulting carbon pollution your fault? Or the fault of the oil giant that supplied the fuel?

Darren Woods, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, the largest publicly traded oil company in the world, has a clear answer. In a rare interview with the media last week, Woods explained that the “dirty secret” behind why the world wasn’t on track to zero out carbon emissions was that it was simply too expensive. In doing so, he subtly pinned the blame for the emissions created by burning oil and gas on his company’s customers. 

“The people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions,” he told Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast. “That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”

The emissions in question, created when oil and gas are actually burned, represent 80 to 95 percent of the worldwide emissions associated with oil companies. In energy wonk-land, these emissions are known as “Scope 3.” Three years ago, under pressure from activist investor groups, Exxon reluctantly revealed the vast scale of its own “Scope 3” emissions for the first time. The company estimated that the products it sold in 2019 resulted in 730 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. For reference, that’s 11 percent of what the entire United States emitted that year.

Big emissions have big consequences. Research from the Union of Concerned Scientists has traced the direct and indirect emissions from fossil fuel producers to ocean acidification, the rise in global temperatures, and wildfires in the Western United States.

Activist investor groups have been calling on oil companies to reduce Scope 3 emissions, but Exxon would rather focus on the direct emissions that come from oil rigs and power plants (Scope 1) and the fuel or electricity purchased for things like operating machinery or powering its offices (Scope 2). Exxon sued two of those investor groups in January over the resolutions they’ve submitted demanding faster emissions cuts, arguing that the repeated submissions amount to abuse of the shareholder proposal system. It’s an aggressive move that some experts see as a sign that Exxon is committed to shutting down conversations about responsibility for the full scope of its emissions. 

This issue is a hot topic in oil company boardrooms, according to Laura Peterson, a corporate analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s clear that they find it a threat,” Peterson said. “I think that they know, because their emissions are very high, that they’re not going to be able to just evade them through carbon capture as their climate transition plans claim, and that it’s going to open them up to litigation. And so they are just trying to squelch it.” 

Oil companies have been trying to shunt responsibility for carbon emissions for a long time. A study in 2021 scrutinizing Exxon’s memos, studies, and advertisements over the past half-century found that the oil giant used rhetoric to shift the blame for climate change onto average people, their customers. In public communications, the company focused on “consumers” and “demand,” implicitly pointing the finger elsewhere. BP employed a similar strategy, popularizing the idea of calculating your personal “carbon footprint” in marketing campaigns in the early 2000s.

Exxon is one of the few major oil companies that has so far neglected to set any targets for cutting its Scope 3 emissions. The company’s board has argued that applying these targets to companies would cause “significant, unintended consequences for society.” Woods has written that the current way Scope 3 emissions are calculated would encourage bad behavior from companies and force consumers to turn to dirty energy sources like coal. “That’s like saying that requiring calorie information on restaurant menus would force people to binge on junk food,” Peterson quipped in a blog post.

As countries move to regulate Scope 3 emissions, companies are lobbying to stop them. In late February, Reuters reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was planning to drop a requirement forcing companies to disclose these emissions from its proposed climate risk rules for corporations. That would place the responsibility for those emissions on customers. But California is heading in a different direction, adopting a law last year that will eventually require large companies that do business in the state to disclose their Scope 3 emissions — including corporate giants like Exxon.

Of course, it’s hard to untangle exactly who bears how much of the blame for the emissions that led to the climate crisis: Big Oil? Governments? Rich countries? Billionaires? Normal people? It’s some combination of all of the above. Oil companies make the case that it’s a “demand” problem — as long as people are driving cars, and thus demanding fossil fuels, then they have to keep producing the gas.

A 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, concluded that people demand “services,” not fossil fuels specifically. In fact, the panel found that people could live comfortably with a lot less fossil fuels. “Demand-side” solutions, including shifts in how buildings are constructed, how people get around, and what they eat, have the potential to reduce emissions 40 to 70 percent across all sectors by 2050.

Climate advocates argue that oil companies, with their history of spreading climate disinformation and trying to block policies to move away from fossil fuels, bear a large portion of the blame for climate change. Across the country, around 30 lawsuits filed by cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to hold Exxon and other fossil fuel companies accountable for deceiving the public about the harms of using their products.

“They’re responsible for a lot of climate damage, and they’re responsible for misleading the public in the past, which led to more damage,” Peterson said. “And now they’re basically saying that they should not be responsible for disclosing these emissions, because they’re just not relevant to their business.”

Unsurprisingly, Exxon’s CEO wants to move past the whole history aspect. “That was 30 years ago,” Woods told Fortune last week. “I mean, today, the world has moved on. The understanding of this challenge has moved on. I think where we are today is, how can we contribute to a solution set, not debate the past?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s a reason Exxon’s CEO says its emissions are your fault on Mar 4, 2024.