Back in 2015, when 174 countries and the European Union came together to finalize the Paris Agreement, each agreed to do its part to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Signatories put forward their own specific targets — known as “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs — that would, theoretically, add up to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

It’s been largely up to each country to figure out how to achieve these emissions goals. Some countries have begun transitioning their power sectors away from fossil fuels, for instance. Others have levied a tax on carbon emissions or promoted electric vehicles.

But countries also want to work together to achieve their NDCs — and they’re trying to create a new global carbon market to do so. The idea is to allow emissions reductions in one country to count toward the climate progress of another. A country like Indonesia, for example, could plant trees or build a wind farm instead of a natural gas plant, and the project would generate carbon “credits” representing some amount of prevented or reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Another country like the United States would then purchase the credits and claim them toward its own NDC.

In theory, such a carbon market would unlock cost-effective climate mitigation options that otherwise wouldn’t be available. It would incentivize wealthy countries to pay for the least expensive emissions reductions strategies first — most likely projects in the developing world — before paying for costlier options. According to an independent analysis, a U.N. carbon market could halve the cost of fulfilling countries’ NDCs, saving them $250 billion by 2030. Essentially, this means 50 percent more emissions reductions at no extra cost.

A United Nations panel of experts has been working for the past year to hammer out the details of the new market in time for COP28, the U.N. climate conference that’s being held in the United Arab Emirates this November and December. The goal is for the carbon market to begin operating next year.

But many independent experts and advocacy organizations question whether this market will actually help address climate change. Many of the world’s existing carbon markets are plagued by problems, and environmental groups are afraid that a new one could distract wealthy countries from reducing their own outsize emissions, instead encouraging them to offset emissions with unreliable and sometimes harmful carbon removal projects in the developing world. 

Now, some environmental groups are calling for a new paradigm — one that isn’t based on market-based carbon accounting. “The time for offsetting is over,” said Carsten Warnecke, co-founder of the nonprofit NewClimate Institute. “What we need now is something completely different.”

Tradable carbon credits are already in widespread use, both in “compliance” carbon markets overseen by regional governments and in “voluntary” markets facilitated by the private sector. Compliance markets, like the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, are used to meet legally mandated emissions reduction requirements. Voluntary markets are more frequently used by big companies — firms as varied as Apple, Chevron, and Procter and Gamble — to meet nonbinding net-zero targets. However, aside from a 1997 policy that’s in the process of being phased out, the U.N. has lacked its own carbon market operating on a global scale.

The U.N.’s new efforts are grounded in a section of the Paris Agreement called Article 6, which recognizes how international cooperation can promote “higher ambition” in countries’ climate plans. Article 6.4 in particular envisions a market mechanism to “contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and support sustainable development.”. Though the idea behind Article 6.4 has been around since the Paris Agreement was written, the U.N. group in charge of designing it, called the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, didn’t start convening until last year. Since then it’s had six contentious meetings to hammer out the details.

The new market “needs to be a tool enabling the world to address the ambition gap it is facing,” Kristin Qui, the Supervisory Body’s chair, said in a statement following the latest round of negotiations in July.

Experts have warned that the tool’s effectiveness depends on how the panel addresses the divisive issue of carbon removal: efforts to take carbon out of the atmosphere so it doesn’t contribute to global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body composed of the world’s foremost experts on global warming, has made it clear that carbon removal will be necessary for the world to meet its Paris Agreement climate targets. But what kinds of removal should be allowed, and whether they should be used to generate credits in the U.N.’s forthcoming carbon market — those are much more difficult questions, and they’ve become a key sticking point for the Supervisory Body.

There are two broad categories of carbon removal. Biological removal typically involves sequestering carbon in soil and forest ecosystems, or changing agricultural practices to be less emissions-intensive. Almost all removal happening today falls into this category, and most of it is “land-based” biological removal, rather than marine-based (although there is growing interest in storing carbon in algae and seaweed and sinking it to the seafloor). 

The other category, known as “engineered” removal, uses chemical reactions to draw CO2 out of the air. Within this category is “direct air capture,” in which carbon is sucked straight out of the atmosphere, and “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” or BECCS, in which CO2 emissions from the burning of crops or other biomass are prevented from escaping into the air. The carbon captured from these processes can be stored in underground rock formations or in durable products like concrete. 

Both categories have their own controversies. Biological removal projects carry a high risk of “reversal,” meaning they’re susceptible to wildfires, logging, development, or other activities that could cause them to release their carbon after just a few years or decades, essentially nullifying their climate benefit. (CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels lasts up to 1,000 years in the atmosphere.) This is on top of concerns about biological removal harming local communities and violating Indigenous peoples’ rights by encroaching on their lands. 

Many environmental groups, like the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance, or CLARA, would like to exclude most of this type of removal from the Article 6.4 mechanism. The group said in a letter to the Supervisory Body that virtually all land-based removal projects are “wholly inappropriate for a carbon market.” If any removal is allowed in the new market, CLARA said, it should only include “activities that actually remove net carbon from the atmosphere.”

Theoretically, this could include engineering-based activities like direct air capture — the other category of removal, which scientists agree is more likely to result in permanent carbon sequestration. But there are risks to banking on a suite of technologies that are still in the demonstration stage and are not yet able to store carbon in meaningful quantities: Currently, just 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 is stored with engineered activities every year, compared to 2 trillion metric tons with biological removal. Environmental groups are worried that including engineered removal in the Article 6.4 mechanism could justify continued fossil fuel extraction, and that BECCS in particular could harm biodiversity by competing for land. Some experts have called for a blanket ban on these techniques — not only from Article 6.4, but from “any other articles of the Paris Agreement.”

The Supervisory Body, which has generally been bullish on land-based removal, has expressed skepticism about engineering-based activities’ role in the new carbon market. In a memo this spring, the panel said engineering-based activities are “technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale,” adding bluntly that they “do not serve any objectives of the Article 6.4 mechanism.” The memo drew intense backlash from carbon removal companies, which urged the Supervisory Body to reverse its position before finalizing its rules.

In the background of all this debate about the Article 6.4 mechanism, however, there’s a deeper question: Should there be a new market for carbon credits at all? In an open letter published this July, more than 120 environmental organizations told the Supervisory Body: “There should not be carbon markets, especially those that enable offsets, under the Paris Agreement.” 

In addition to turning Global South countries into “sacrifice zones,” they said, foreign carbon removal likely won’t represent real, net emissions reductions, and it could discourage wealthy countries from taking immediate action to reduce emissions domestically.

The letter didn’t offer much of an alternative, but many green groups have spent the past few years envisioning a different approach based on climate “contributions.” The idea is to allow countries, companies, and other polluters to continue supporting legitimate conservation and carbon-sequestration activities abroad, but without claiming the resulting emissions reductions in their NDCs, net-zero pledges, or other climate goals.

One version of this approach has appeared in the private sector, where carbon credits used to “offset” ongoing emissions have fallen under intense scrutiny. Instead of funding climate mitigation activities in order to call themselves “net-zero,” some companies have chosen to simply advertise their financial contributions to those activities.

Within Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the contribution model has drawn attention in two places. The first is actually within Article 6.4, where, during COP27 last year, negotiators agreed to recognize a new kind of carbon credit called a “mitigation contribution” unit. These units could be bought and sold like carbon credits, but they upend the logic of a traditional carbon market because the carbon savings would only count toward emissions reductions in the host country. The donor country would essentially be funding foreign climate mitigation, and could claim progress toward its climate finance goals — promises that rich countries have made to fund climate mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. The donor would remain responsible for reducing emissions domestically, in order to fulfill its NDC.

At COP27, environmental groups said this development signaled an “overdue paradigm shift” that could carry over into the private sector, showing that an alternative to offsetting is “not only possible but better.”

The other place within Article 6 for contribution-based climate action is in Article 6.8, which proposes a web-based platform to facilitate “nonmarket” climate cooperation between countries. Details still need to be ironed out — Article 6.8 is the least-developed part of Article 6 — but proponents have suggested that the platform serve as a kind of “matching facility” to pair countries looking for climate finance with those offering it.

Because this matching facility wouldn’t be governed by market forces, it could give developing countries more latitude to seek funding for projects based on factors other than their potential to mitigate carbon emissions. It elevates what Peter Riggs, CLARA’s co-coordinator, called “co-benefits” — hard-to-quantify but vital objectives like boosting biodiversity, protecting Indigenous rights, and adapting to extreme weather fueled by climate change.

“We feel that 6.8 is actually the better model for contribution because you’re not limited to a carbon metric,” Riggs said, although he added that both this approach and the mitigation contribution units in 6.4 could move things in the right direction.

For now, environmental groups are awaiting an updated Article 6.4 draft that the Supervisory Body is expected to publish before its next meeting in mid-September — a “bellwether,” according to Riggs, that will signal the direction the body’s negotiations will take before COP28. In the near term, it’s likely that activists will focus on blocking the least reliable kinds of carbon removal from Article 6.4’s offset-based carbon market, but Riggs said he’s hopeful that growing recognition of the “shakiness” of the standard offsetting approach could help give more of a foothold to the contribution-based alternatives.

A work program to flesh out Article 6.8 is scheduled to take place in two phases over the next three years, with a progress review set for sometime in 2026.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the UN designs a new carbon market, experts call for a different approach on Sep 1, 2023.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

On a punishingly hot August morning, Jake Price walked through his rows of citrus trees, tucked in the back corner of a field behind an elementary school. They looked like an image right out of a commercial for Florida orange juice: lush, leafy trees, many of them laden with plump fruit.

Only this wasn’t in Florida, it was in Georgia.

Price is an extension agent for the University of Georgia in Lowndes County, and his trees are in Valdosta, about half an hour from the Florida border. He’s growing several kinds of small citrus fruit, including a type of mandarin known as a tango, one of the easy-to-peel varieties that’s easy to throw in a kid’s school lunch.

“Look how much fruit this tree has,” Price said, approaching one of the tango trees. “There’s probably 25 pounds per tree on these.”

Citrus is a new crop for Georgia, one that’s taking root thanks to the combined forces of climate change, crop science, and disease in Florida. Although that citrus powerhouse is just to the south, historically it’s been just enough colder in Georgia to discourage farmers from growing citrus. Freezing was considered too big a risk, a threat that could take out the fruit just as it’s ripening.

But a new citrus industry in Georgia is growing rapidly. There were very few citrus trees in the state a decade ago. Now, there are more than 500,000 trees across nearly 4,000 acres.

The burgeoning industry faced its biggest test yet last winter. Around Christmas, citrus trees in southern Georgia had to weather six days below freezing. Many of their leaves shriveled up and died. By January, the frigid air had killed limbs and split huge wounds into trunks and branches, weakening them permanently. Farmers worried the freeze could hurt their new crop.

But Price isn’t a farmer. He’s a scientist, so the cold snap became an experiment. 

Most citrus trees are hybrids: a delicious fruit like tangos grafted onto the roots of a variety with other desirable traits, like a manageable size or resistance to pests and diseases. Price is conducting a study to find out which rootstocks weathered the freeze well and which took a lot of damage or are struggling to bounce back. 

“It’s kind of a rare opportunity to get some data on which rootstocks give the best cold protection on these tangos, so I’m gonna get it while the getting’s good,” Price said.

Farmers will be able to use his findings to ensure they’re planting trees that can weather Georgia winters, which aren’t as cold as they used to be.

“I just remember being cold a lot,” Price said of his childhood in the 1970s. “You would be cold in October. But now, October, we’re still in the 90s sometimes.” 

Climate change is heating up winters especially fast. The average winter temperature in Albany, Georgia, has risen 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, according to Climate Central. That means fewer sustained freezes, so Georgia is increasingly fertile ground for citrus.

Farmer Justin Jones decided to take advantage of these changes when he was looking to diversify his crops. He was growing the Georgia staples of pecans and cotton at his farm near Albany, in southwest Georgia, but wanted to add something new to the mix.

“It goes back to the old adage, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. “Spread out your risk a little bit.”

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Peaches — the state’s iconic fruit, though far from its largest crop — need a certain amount of chill hours in winter to produce fruit, so the same winter warming that’s helping citrus is hurting peaches. And in 2018, Hurricane Michael, which rapidly gained strength as it approached the Florida Panhandle thanks to warmer water temperatures, cut a wide swath of devastation across southwest Georgia farms, hurting that year’s crop and doing long-term damage to peach and pecan trees.

This year, Georgia peaches are in crisis. An unusually warm January and February coaxed peach trees to bloom early. A typical seasonal freeze in March then devastated the blossoms. The federal government declared a natural disaster in 18 Georgia counties following the freeze, to help farmers cope. Similar dynamics have also slammed Georgia blueberries in the past few years, even though blueberries are usually one of the top 10 crops in the state. 

In his bid to spread out his risks by diversifying, Jones found citrus appealing because it has the potential to make good money: Each tree can bear a lot of fruit, so farmers can get a lot of revenue out of each acre. Because the industry is so new in Georgia, he was also able to open a packing house — an additional revenue stream. Jones now grows satsumas and navel oranges.

“We have a piece of fruit that looks like it’s grown in California, but tastes like it’s grown in Florida, which is what everybody wants,” he said.

Georgia growers like Jones are also taking advantage of an opening in the citrus market created by disease. Citrus greening, caused by bacteria spread by a bug known as the Asian citrus psyllid, has devastated Florida’s citrus industry since it first arrived in 2005. As of 2022, the state had less than half the citrus acres it did in the 1990s.

“Unfortunately, in the farming community, in the farming world, somebody has to do bad for somebody to do good,” said Jones.

Growers in Georgia are taking steps to keep out the disease that’s decimated Florida’s citrus, and Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, is now pushing for the state to have a seat on a national panel on citrus disease.

“We have to be conscious of what we’re doing here in Georgia, in order to protect not only our industry, but our sister state industry,” said Lindy Savelle, president of the Georgia Citrus Association.

Despite the disease and the recent growth of Georgia citrus, Florida still has about 100 times the citrus acreage Georgia does. And the nascent industry is an even smaller fraction of Georgia’s overall agricultural output, which boasts more than a million acres of cotton, over 600,000 acres of peanuts, and about 20,000 acres of blueberries, compared to just 4,000 acres of citrus.

Still, the industry is gaining steam. This year, the state legislature established a citrus commodity commission, a signal it’s becoming a big enough crop to need research and marketing. 

Last winter’s sustained freeze will likely hurt this year’s citrus crop, as trees that took heavy damage expend their energy regrowing limbs and leaves instead of producing fruit. But because citrus ripens in late fall and winter, Price and other experts said the trees have time to recover and regrow — unlike the peach trees that had their delicate blooms destroyed by the later freeze in March.

Now that Georgia’s small citrus growers have shown they can survive a bad winter, Savelle said, bigger farms are getting interested.

“The confidence level of our growers is continuing to go up,” she said. “They realize, ‘Well, my gosh, if I can handle 17, 15 degrees for four days, that’s a 30-year weather event. I think I can do this.’”

Even though the freeze may hurt this year’s crop, Savelle said it was also a big test — and Georgia citrus passed.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As winters warm, the citrus industry squeezes into Georgia on Aug 31, 2023.

Mike Strain, the commissioner who runs the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, stared out the window of a Black Hawk helicopter on Tuesday, hovering over land that had become unrecognizable. From thousands of feet up in the air, he could observe the transformative effects of the drought that had gripped the state all summer long. Lakes and ponds lay completely empty, their beds cracked. Swatches of earth that would be, on a normal year, lush and green had turned brown. Acres of evergreen trees — oaks and magnolias and azaleas, signatures of the state — had begun to wither. 

“It looks like West Texas,” Strain told Grist, the surprise evident in his voice. 

These dry conditions have helped ignite a spate of wildfires across the state. In an average year, wildfires burn roughly 8,000 acres in Louisiana; fires in August alone have set alight more than 60,000. The worst of them, the Tiger Island Fire, currently burning near the southwest border with Texas, has taken out 30,000 acres so far, and is being called the largest wildfire that Louisiana has seen in 80 years. Two towns near that fire have been evacuated, and Strain announced a statewide burn ban as his agency and the state fire marshal’s office have struggled to respond to a kind of natural disaster uncommon in the swampy state, one of the country’s wettest. 

The fires follow a summer of record-breaking heat and dryness across Louisiana. Shreveport in northwest Louisiana had its second warmest summer on record; New Orleans had its second driest. According to Danielle Manning, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service New Orleans/Baton Rouge forecast office, the city of Alexandria in central Louisiana had its warmest summer on record by a large margin — by nearly 2 full degrees — and a nearby fire led the police to close roads over the weekend. 

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Manning traced the unusually hot and dry conditions to late May, when a system of high pressure air parked over the state and has stuck around since. Some places haven’t seen rain since the spring. 

“It’s not unusual to be underneath high pressure [air] at times during the summer, but for it to be as persistent as it was this summer is extremely unusual,” Manning said, adding that the frequency of extreme conditions like these are expected to increase in a warming climate. 

The drought, in combination with record-breaking heat, has sucked many of Louisiana’s characteristic bayous dry. Stock ponds that farmers have relied on for generations to water their cattle are empty. The detritus left from  hurricanes in recent years have made these conditions even riper for wildfires — fallen timber from hurricanes Laura, Delta, and Ida lay across approximately one million acres of the state, according to Strain. In such conditions, wildfires start easily, Manning said. A single lightning strike or trailer chains dragging along a highway could set one off. 

Officials that Grist spoke to said that they plan to request help from the state to fight future wildfires, in case this summer’s conditions turn out not to be an anomaly. Strain hopes to expand his firefighting force by 50 personnel and to obtain additional firefighting equipment like bulldozers and air tankers. Ashley Rodrigue, a spokesperson in the state fire marshal’s office, said that while her agency has never dealt with wildfires of this magnitude before, the experience of working in a disaster-prone state has helped to mobilize quickly. 

“You can think of it like football — the game is the same,” Rodrigue said. “But the play-calling based on where you’re at in the game is what changes, and in this instance, the play is for wildfires.”

Nonetheless, there have been some challenges: When a fire department is depleted of energy or equipment, the fire marshal’s office is supposed to step in and support them by finding additional resources. One of the things that they’re finding, Rodrigue said, is that some fire departments don’t always know what to ask for, because they haven’t dealt with anything of this scale before. 

The National Climate Prediction Center has forecasted a 50 to 60 percent chance that conditions across Louisiana return to normal by mid-September. The Tiger Island Fire doubled in size over the weekend, but in a visit to the town of DeRidder on Tuesday, Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said that recent rain has slowed the blaze. That fire was 50 percent contained as of Tuesday. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Even the bayous of Louisiana are now threatened by wildfires on Aug 31, 2023.

Making homes more efficient and more electric is critical to combating climate change. But the undertaking can be expensive and beyond the financial reach of many families. 

Help, however, is on the way.

Residential energy use accounts for one-fifth of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. President Biden’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, takes aim at this issue by allocating $8.8 billion to home energy efficiency rebates primarily for at low- and moderate-income households.

“For the federal government, this is the largest investment in history,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “These rebates have the potential to provide tremendous support, particularly for low-income households, in terms of reducing pollution, reducing energy costs, and making homes more comfortable.” 

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States will administer the rebate programs under guidance the Department of Energy released in late July. The money could become available to consumers as early as the end of this year, though the bulk is expected throughout 2024. In some cases, the incentives could cover the entire cost of a project. 

Incentives will fall into two buckets, with about half designated for home electrification and the remainder going toward overall reductions in energy use. The funding will be tied to household income. 

States must allocate about 40 percent of the electrification money they receive to low-income single-family households and another 10 percent toward low-income multifamily buildings. The rest of the electrification rebates must go to moderate-income households. These are minimums, said Kresowik, noting that states can, and some likely will, make even more of the rebates need-based.

Income limits are location dependent and set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Low income is defined as 80 percent of area’s median household income, while moderate income is up to 150 percent. What that means can vary widely. In San Francisco, for instance, the low income threshold for a family of four is $148,650, while in Bullock County, Alabama it’s $52,150. 

The rebates also are larger for low-income households. On the electrification front, the guidelines call for up to $8,000 for heat pumps, $840 for induction stoves, and $4,000 to upgrade an electric panel, among other incentives. That said, no single address can receive more than $14,000 over the life of the program. The discounts are largely designed to be available when the items are purchased, which avoids having to paying out of pocket and waiting for a check from the government. 

“These are advanced technologies. Therefore they often cost more, but they save more energy and help save the climate,” said Kara Saul-Rinaldi, president and CEO of the AnnDyl Policy Group, an energy and environment strategy firm. “If we want our low-income communities to invest in something that’s going to benefit everyone, like the climate, we need to provide them with additional resources.”

For the energy-reduction incentives, the type of technology used doesn’t matter as long as households lower their overall energy use. Homeowners could do this by installing more insulation, sealing windows, or upgrading to more efficient heating and cooling systems, among other options. The rebate amounts are a bit more complex to calculate but are based on either modeled or actual energy savings, and increase if you save more energy or are low income. 

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Kresowik says efficiency retrofits can cost $25,000 to $30,000 or more. For many people, the Inflation Reduction Act could help put such projects within reach for the first time. While a homeowner cannot claim both an electrification and efficiency rebate for the same improvement, the incentives can be added to other federal weatherization and tax credit initiatives and any offers from utility companies. 

But the latest rebates will be available only after states have set up their respective programs. For that reason, “the families who most need that help will be better served to wait if they can,” said Sage Briscoe, director of federal policy for the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America. Of course, that may not be feasible if, say, an appliance breaks, but doing so could potentially net a low-income household thousands of dollars in savings. 

“The key is to start planning,” Kresowik said of the coming rebates. Talking to a contractor now, he said, can position households to take advantage of the programs as soon as they start accepting claims.

The rebates, though, may not be available everywhere. Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Dakota have so far declined to apply for Inflation Reduction Act funds and could reject the home energy rebates as well. That means a sizable number of Americans may not see a boon from these latest rebates, either because they earn too much money or live in a state that refuses to participate in IRA programs. 

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Federal tax credits, however, are available now to help anyone pursuing projects such as installing solar panels or heat pump water heaters. The credits reset annually, but because they offset tax liabilities, the ability to fully utilize them often depends on a filer’s tax burden. 

“There are those among us who are privileged enough that they probably can go ahead and start making those investments now,” said Briscoe. Rewiring America is in the process of launching tools to help people plan for, claim, and receive incentives, which can be complicated. But experts say that even this influx in funding won’t ultimately be enough to meet the need nationally.  

“This is just a drop in the bucket,” said Saul-Rinaldi. Kresowik notes that there are 26 million low income households that still use fossil fuels for heating. At $30,000 each, electrifying those homes alone would cost $780 billion.

Saul-Rinaldi also sees a risk that the current program is limited by quirks in the guidance from the Department of Energy that may keep some contractors from participating, such as mandating in-person energy audits, even when utility data would suffice. But, she says, there is still time to smooth out those issues, and she hopes that the programs are “so successful that there is a wide demand across the country for additional funds so that we can continue to upgrade and electrify America’s homes.”

Ideally, Briscoe wants to see high-efficiency appliances and design become the norm, and she thinks incentives can help push the market in that direction. Previous federal rebate efforts, such as a Great Recession stimulus bill included $300 million in appliance efficiency funding, didn’t quite do that. But Briscoe says this latest attempt through the Inflation Reduction Act is not only orders of magnitude more ambitious but also more holistic and works in concert with other programs — such as installer training initiatives — to ensure the rebates aren’t operating in a vacuum.

“There’s some real urgency to making sure that we try to get the fossil fuels out of our homes,” said Briscoe. “The climate isn’t going to wait.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electrifying your home is about to get a lot cheaper on Aug 31, 2023.