The California Air Resources Board has announced a new landmark for the state: for the first time, over half of diesel fuel used statewide was replaced by cleaner fuels, as of the first quarter of 2023.

The shift can be largely attributed to the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which is designed to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions through improving vehicle technology, decreasing fuel consumption and providing cleaner fuel alternatives.

“As technological advances put a zero-emissions future within reach, the use of cleaner fuels offers an essential tool to reduce pollution now,” California Air Resources Board Executive Officer Steven Cliff said in a statement. “A 50% reduction in diesel means cleaner air, healthier communities and a commitment to reaching carbon neutrality in California by 2045.”

According to the California Air Resources Board, the cleaner fuel sources include “renewable diesel, biodiesel, electricity, and hydrogen.”

As explained by the California Energy Commission, biodiesel was first introduced in the state in 2000 and is made mostly from soybean oil and other recycled oils. First introduced in 2012, renewable diesel is made from animal waste oils.

Through LCFS, the state has swapped nearly 2 billion gallons of diesel fuel with these other fuel alternatives in 2022. Compliance with the LCFS began in 2011, and since then, the program has replaced about 8.6 billion gallons of diesel. 

The latest milestone is part of the state’s goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2045, which is part of California’s AB 32, or the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. In the spring of this year, USA Today reported that California approved a world-first ban on new diesel trucks by 2036, another step in the mission to minimize state emissions.

Earlier this month, the California Air Resources Board announced a new program to help truck fleet owners and operators transition to zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. The program, called the Cal Fleet Advisor, offers free, personalized assistance and information on funding and other aid to make the transition.

“The transition to zero-emissions transportation — and to cleaner air — means working collaboratively with the owners and operators who provide a critical service to California’s economy by transporting goods across the state,” board chair Liane Randolph said in a statement. “Cal Fleet Advisor is an example of the innovative outreach and assistance that California has committed to provide to make a zero-emissions future a reality.”

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You may not see the evidence every day, but the electrification of our economy is…

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Here’s a trick question. Can #1 plastics — otherwise known as PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastics…

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What if companies had to pay for the problems their carbon emissions cause? Their profits would plunge, according to new estimates, possibly wiping out trillions in financial gains.

These results, spelled out in a recent study in the journal Science, are based on analysis of almost 15,000 publicly-traded companies around the world. To calculate how much each ton of carbon emissions ends up costing society, economists used the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate of $190 per ton. 

For all of those companies combined, the damage would run into the trillions of dollars, Christian Leuz, a coauthor of the study and a business professor at the University of Chicago, told the Associated Press. The researchers only included direct emissions from companies, not “downstream” emissions related to the products they sell. (So emissions from the operations needed to build cars would count; the pollution that comes out of its tailpipe wouldn’t.) 

They found that the cost of damage surpassed profits for highly polluting industries, including energy, utilities, transportation, and materials manufacturers — a group that accounted for 89 percent of the total. Researchers didn’t name any specific companies. 

The study arrives during a summer when the costs of climate change are coming clearly into view, as historic flooding, deadly wildfires, and frequent heat waves have rattled the United States. The administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned last week that the pace of disasters has been so frequent that it’s running out of cash. And the economic consequences of climate change go beyond emergency response: Extreme heat is believed to cost the U.S. economy billions in lost productivity every year.

But even as the toll of carbon emissions becomes apparent, governments around the world are pouring more money into support for fossil fuel companies than ever before. Last year, subsidies for oil, coal, and natural gas reached a record high of $7 trillion, according to a report out Thursday from the International Monetary Fund, which works out to $13 million every minute. That’s nearly double what the world spends on education and equal to roughly 7 percent of global economic output. Subsidies often come in the form of tax breaks intended to keep people’s gas prices and energy bills low, but they come with huge costs, slowing the shift to a cleaner economy.

The economists behind the new study of corporate emissions make the case that forcing companies to disclose their greenhouse gas pollution is a start toward decreasing emissions. Some governments are starting to move toward this approach: The European Union adopted rules earlier this year that will require companies to disclose their emissions, following a similar move by the U.K. government in 2022. It’s an approach also being considered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and California lawmakers. 

There’s some evidence that such disclosures could prompt companies to reduce emissions. One study found that contamination levels dropped after fracking companies were forced to disclose their pollution, and that these kinds of regulations enabled more public pressure on corporations.

“Put plainly,” the study concludes, “it is difficult to imagine a successful approach to the climate challenge that does not have widespread mandatory disclosure as its foundation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The true cost of climate pollution? 44% of corporate profits. on Aug 28, 2023.

After a blazingly hot stretch of summer in early July 2022, the skies broke open over Buchanan County, Virginia. Floodwaters damaged almost 100 homes and destroyed miles of road in the rural, overwhelmingly low-income mountain towns that dot the region. In the wake of the devastation, local officials spent $387,000 compiling a flood preparedness plan. The multistep blueprint analyzed inundation risks and recommended potential risk-reduction projects. 

To develop the proposal, the county tapped the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, a state program that makes hundreds of millions of dollars available for disaster risk analysis and mitigation. They were among the first to do so after money for such things became available in 2021 through proceeds from a carbon-offset program called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. But those plans, and the fund, are now in doubt because Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to withdraw from the initiative despite the fact it has provided $657 million for flood preparedness and energy-efficiency programs and reduced the state’s carbon emissions by almost 17 percent.

Critics of such a move say that, beyond curtailing the significant emissions reductions RGGI has already incurred, pulling out will reduce the funding available to help communities prepare for increasingly common extreme weather. It is, they say, a huge mistake and, what’s more, illegal. A group of four Southern environmental nonprofits, led by the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed suit on August 21 to stop it.  

“Repealing this regulation is just outside of their authority,” said Nate Belforado, a senior attorney with the center. “If they disagree with it, they have to take it to the General Assembly, and they’ve tried to do that and it hasn’t been successful.”

RGGI, often pronounced “Reggie,” is a collaborative cap-and-invest effort that links 12 states stretching from Maine to Virginia. Power plants in those states must acquire one carbon-emission allowance for every ton of CO2 emitted, with the permissible level of emissions declining over time. Ninety percent of the allowances are sold through quarterly auctions, generating money states can invest as they choose. The program reportedly has slashed power plant emissions in participating states by half and raised nearly $6 billion.  

Virginia joined the program two years ago, following the legislature’s 53-45 vote to require participation. Of the $657 million Old Dominion has raised, 45 percent has gone toward the Community Flood Preparedness Fund to help communities with resilience planning and municipal projects. (At least a quarter of the fund’s annual allocations go to low-income communities.) The remainder has financed home weatherization for low-income residents, reducing their utility bills through simple, but often expensive, home improvements.  

But Youngkin says the rate increases utilities instituted to cover the costs of participation in the initiative create a financial burden for low-income Virginians. “RGGI remains a regressive tax which does not do anything to incentivize the reduction of emissions in Virginia,” his office told 13th News NOW. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) “Virginians will see a lower energy bill in due time because we are withdrawing from RGGI through a regulatory process.”

The appointed Air Pollution Control Board, of which four of seven members were personally named by Youngkin, voted in June to withdraw from the program by repealing the Community Flood Preparedness Act that made Virginia a part of it in 2020. If the decision stands, the move would take effect December 30. Environmental groups said the proper procedure would have been to introduce a legislative bill and have lawmakers decide. One poll found that 66 percent of Virginians support staying in RGGI; to go against them, Youngkin’s critics argue, is a fundamentally anti-democratic move. A comment period for the withdrawal remains open until Wednesday.

Beyond that criticism, Benforado calls Youngkin’s move frustrating given the progress made under the initiative. “Virginia’s monopoly utilities are required to zero out their carbon by 2050,” he said. “RGGI is the tool that will help us get there.”

Municipalities all over Virginia have used the flood-resiliency funds to shore up infrastructure, draft evacuation plans, and restore blighted wetlands. “Local governments are on the front lines of the climate crisis,” said Mary-Carson Stiff, the executive director of the nonprofit Wetlands Water Watch, which worked with Buchanan County on its flood-resiliency plan. “And they are on their own, to come up with resources to come up with plans and to fund strategies to protect against losses.”

In a 2020 report, the organization noted that most of the state’s rural communities do not have any flooding or other climate resilience plans to speak of. Proponents of RGGI say that before Virginia joined, there was almost no money for disaster preparation and planning, which can be time- and labor-intensive, and requires hiring specialists and conducting environmental studies.

Stiff says Virginia’s use of funds raised through the initiative has been fairly forward-thinking. “We’re unique in the other participating RGGI states where our auction proceeds are being spent on grant programs that are actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.  

Youngkin’s claim that Virginia ratepayers underwrite the cap-and-invest effort echoes an argument Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest utility, has made. It has said in public comments that the costs it had incurred under RGGI made it necessary to raise rates. It has proposed a rider of $2.29 on top of recent increases caused by fluctuating natural gas prices.

Mayor Justin Wilson of Alexandria, which has benefited from RGGI-funded flood-resiliency projects such as a redesigned downtown waterfront and storm drain expansion, says people were already paying dearly for the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, and that the Community Flood Preparedness Fund has been a godsend. Flooding costs Virginians $400 million per year, according to some estimates.

“I’ve stood in the homes of residents that have seen their livelihoods destroyed,” said Wilson. “The impacts of these storm events are a tax on the community.”

Youngkin has promised alternative sources of funding for flood preparedness and weatherization, and has proposed a $200 million revolving loan fund with a similar purpose. Wilson said he’ll believe there’s a contingency plan when he sees it. All the while, small floods that would have been unusual a couple of decades ago are happening with greater frequency, and the city struggles to keep up. “We have billions of dollars of investment we are gonna have to make,” the mayor said.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the state, Buchanan County’s flood-resilience planning may be complete, but officials must find money for the improvements it outlines. On the anniversary of last summer’s inundation, flood survivors were still fixing up their homes, mourning the woman who had died, wondering where the next resources for them were going to come from, and nervously looking at silt-filled and waste-dammed creeks as summer rain began to fall. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Virginia is bailing on a carbon cap-and-invest program. Activists say that might be illegal. on Aug 28, 2023.

This story was originally published by The 19th and is republished with permission.

Extreme heat has already made pregnancy more dangerous. Now, it is also complicating efforts to control when and how someone becomes pregnant: Record heat waves across the country could threaten access to effective pregnancy tests, condoms, and emergency contraception pills. 

All of these items can sustain serious damage in extreme heat, rendering them ineffective when used. And all have become critical resources for people living in states with abortion bans and who are trying to avoid pregnancy. In those states, few options exist to terminate an unintended pregnancy other than acquiring abortion pills online or traveling out of state for care.

Many states that have banned abortion are experiencing broiling summers, including Texas, Louisiana, parts of Mississippi, and Arkansas. Florida — where abortion is banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy and a six-week ban could take effect later this year — has also recorded unusually high temperatures. 

“People aren’t thinking about the effects of extremely hot heat for all kinds of medical care,” said Rachel Rebouché, dean at the Temple University School of Law, who studies reproductive health law. “And, specific to reproductive health care, people aren’t thinking about condoms and contraception and reproductive health as essential health care.”

In some states that restrict or ban abortion, abortion funds — which typically aid people in paying for the procedure — have put more emphasis on distributing supplies to prevent pregnancy and to detect it early, even while noting that even the most effective contraception isn’t foolproof. Almost all of the supplies they ship are heat-sensitive.

The Yellowhammer Fund, which serves people mostly in Alabama and Mississippi, mails emergency contraception to people in those two states as well as in parts of Florida. Jane’s Due Process, a Texas-based organization, has for the past three years given people kits including emergency contraception, pregnancy tests, and condoms. The Lilith Fund, an abortion fund in Texas, recently began distributing “post-abortion” kits for people traveling out of state for care, which include pregnancy tests, condoms, and thermometers. 

Pregnancy tests generally should be stored at a temperature between 36 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Emergency contraception pills should be kept between 68 and 77 degrees, per the Food and Drug Administration, though they can be transported in temperatures ranging between 59 and 86 degrees. For condoms, the World Health Organization recommends an average shipment temperature no warmer than 86 degrees, noting that peak temperatures shouldn’t exceed 122 degrees and that condoms could be damaged if they are stored at above 104 degrees for an extended period of time. 

Extreme heat has already complicated efforts to disseminate contraceptive supplies. Last month, staff from the Lilith Fund reported heat damage to about $3,500 worth of pregnancy tests, thermometers and condoms, the result of a temporary air-conditioning outage at a storage facility in San Antonio. The organization was able to raise money from supporters to replace those items, but will be factoring heat risk in future budgets.

“It’s on our radar, and it’s on the radar of our partners as well,” said Cristina Parker, the fund’s communications director. “This definitely has an impact on our budget, no doubt.”

Other organizations haven’t experienced similar damage. But organizers and health scholars indicated concern that the unusually warm summer — with temperatures across much of the South consistently surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit at a higher frequency than usual — will undercut people’s ability to access heat-sensitive reproductive health supplies.

“One thing we’ve always stressed is do not keep kits in your car, especially in Texas heat,” said Graci D’Amore, who coordinates the distribution of reproductive health kits for Jane’s Due Process. “It’s 120 degrees in the car, and Plan B needs to be kept at below 80 degrees for it to maintain efficacy.”

Jane’s Due Process stores its supplies in an air-conditioned office building. But the fear of losing power is more pressing than it was even a few years ago, before a winter snowstorm — also unusual for the state — caused a massive power outage.

“The fear and threat of the [power] grid failing — I think it’s on everyone’s mind,” D’Amore said. 

Many organizations, including the Yellowhammer Fund and the Texas family planning provider Every Body Texas, distribute emergency contraception through the mail. But even if medications are stored in a climate-controlled atmosphere, they risk exposure to heat while waiting in someone’s mailbox, at their doorstep or in a delivery vehicle. In those cases, there is little health or reproductive rights organizations can do other than encourage people to bring mail in as quickly as possible.

“When I bring in packages, even when they have not been outside for very long, the contents have been hot to the touch,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a health law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s no way to control what happens once it leaves your hand.”

The heat burden, Sepper and others noted, doesn’t fall equally. People who don’t have access to regular air-conditioning in their homes or cars are more likely to be exposed to extreme heat and to potentially risk damage to family planning and reproductive health supplies. Those who seek abortions and who have to travel out of state, which can mean several hours or even days’ worth of driving, could also suffer more. 

“Even people who have cars with functioning air conditioners will find their car engines or air-conditioning can struggle in long travel in this heat,” Sepper said. “If you’re in a car that doesn’t have functioning air-conditioning or that might struggle to make long distances in the heat — we will see for poorer people, the travel out of state will become even more onerous than it already is.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat could impact the effectiveness of birth control and pregnancy tests on Aug 27, 2023.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A cutting-edge energy storage company is building its main manufacturing plant where a once-thriving West Virginia steel mill once stood in the city of Weirton. According to lawmakers, the much-lauded project was made possible by incentives from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by President Biden one year ago last week.

For supporters, it’s a sign that climate policies can also breathe life back into deindustrialized coal and steel communities with green jobs. The symbolism is compelling but how much those communities benefit will depend on a wide array of factors.

Form Energy, a Massachusetts-based company helmed by a former Tesla vice-president, broke ground on its iron-air battery manufacturing plant this past May. Workers will produce batteries capable of storing electricity for 100 hours, which will run on iron, water and air instead of the more common but less-abundant metal lithium. The $760 million project will create 750 well-paying permanent jobs, the company said.

The plant is being constructed on the ashes of the old Weirton steel mill, once the beating heart of the steel economy in the Ohio River valley. At its height in the 1940s, the mill was West Virginia’s number one taxpayer and its largest employer, boasting a 13,000-strong workforce.

“You could literally graduate one day from high school and be hired at the steel mill making very good money,” said Mark Glyptis, president of the United Steelworkers Local 2911 and a third-generation steelworker from Weirton.

But Weirton’s economy began to wither in the 1970s. Local industry slowly declined as the market began to prefer cheaper foreign steel – and, Glyptis said, stopped enforcing regulations on the material.

The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003. The fallout, said Glyptis, has been “heartbreaking.”

“It changed the landscape and the community has suffered significantly,” said Glyptis. “Our children, many of whom were planning on staying and living in the valley, have had to leave the valley to seek employment somewhere else.”

After the decline of domestic coal and steel, West Virginia transitioned from a production-based economy to a service-based one. This was a major blow to residents’ economic wellbeing, said Ted Boettner, senior researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute.

The Weirton steel mill paid an average of roughly $16 an hour in the 1970s, which was a “decent wage,” said Boettner. By contrast, in 2013, he found that Walmart, then the state’s biggest employer, paid half of its employees less than $15 an hour – a comparison that does not account for inflation, he said.

Glyptis is optimistic that the new battery plant will help revitalize the community where he grew up. “There’ll be significant opportunities for our children to prosper,” he said.

The IRA’s carbon-cutting incentives were touted as a way to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions by 40 percent from 2003 levels while bringing manufacturing jobs back onshore. Since the law’s passage last year, manufacturers have announced 83 new or expanded major clean energy manufacturing facilities, including 14 battery manufacturing facilities, according to the American Clean Power Association.

“They’ve made the US the place for the private sector to invest in clean energy,” Samantha Smith, senior adviser for clean energy jobs at the AFL-CIO, said of the IRA’s incentives.

Form Energy has agreed to provide employees decent wages and working conditions. That is not merely a sign of the company’s altruism. The IRA incentivizes green energy developers to pay workers a prevailing wage and to have a certain share of labor done by workers in registered apprenticeship programs.

By meeting those requirements, companies can get a 30 percent tax credit on qualifying projects. If they fail to meet the standards, that percentage drops to 6 percent. “Those conditions … are great,” said Smith.

The landmark policy also sets aside a share of manufacturing tax credits specifically for facilities based in former coal communities, said Ben Beachy, industrial policy expert at the labor-climate group BlueGreen Alliance. “This law rightly recognizes that an energy transition that is fair for workers and communities will not automatically happen,” he said. “It needs to be a deliberate policy choice.”

Challenges to unionization

At the new battery plant’s well-attended groundbreaking ceremony in May, Form Energy also specifically committed to employing at least some unionized workers, said Glyptis.

But the IRA stops short of directly requiring companies to employ unionized labor. On the campaign trail, Biden indicated support for making union neutrality – wherein companies agree not to contest a union vote – a necessary condition for obtaining federal funding, but that requirement is not in the IRA.

Absent union representation, workers’ ability to protect their working conditions and advocate for better benefits and wages that exceed the federal prevailing wage would be severely muted, said Boettner of the Ohio River Valley Institute.

“I think in order for West Virginia to fully benefit from the clean energy economy, it has to be very focused on rebuilding the labor movement in the state and making it stronger,” he said.

Green industries are less unionized than fossil fuel sectors are. Changing that won’t be easy, said Smith of the AFL-CIO. The US labor movement has faced decades of attacks. And the majority of investment from the IRA has so far gone to states that, like West Virginia, are controlled by Republicans and have passed anti-union “right to work” policies.

“We’ve got some state governments that are determined to drive unions out of their state,” she said. “They even market themselves to employers on that basis.”

But she said the AFL-CIO and its affiliate unions are “pouring a lot of resources” into organizing green sectors. She feels optimistic that they’re up to the challenge.

One thing that could help: the US Department of Energy has issued guidance saying IRA investments for businesses that have a unionized workforce should sign binding legal agreements with unions.

“It’s critical that those rules be enforced,” Beachy of the BlueGreen Alliance said.

‘A pioneer’

The new battery plant alone likely cannot singlehandedly revive the Ohio River valley’s economy. While Weirton Steel employed thousands of workers, Form Energy’s plant will employ fewer than 1,000.

But Patrick Ford, a director at the Frontier Group, the firm that paid to remediate the former Weirton steel mill site and prepare it for new development with additional incentives from the IRA, said he expects the battery facility will spark further investment.

“You need a pioneer,” he said.

Seeing a developer break ground on a formerly contaminated site, he said, will encourage developers to come to the region, too. He noted that there are still more than 2,000 acres (810 hectares) of the old Weirton steel plant’s footprint available for new businesses. He estimated the site could support thousands of additional jobs and billions of dollars in further investment.

Boettner said the battery plant could lead to the creation of a cluster of battery plants in the Ohio River valley. However, the Biden administration has not required power grids to use batteries and absent such mandates, battery power will have to prove it can compete in the market, he said.

“That’s a question mark,” Boettner said.

Other battery developers have announced plans to locate plants in West Virginia, but there’s no guarantee they will all get built, said Boettner. Even if they do, the state won’t see the full benefits unless it taxes the new developments to pay for public services, he said.

Historically, West Virginia has not adequately taxed fossil fuel producers for extraction, Boettner said. “That’s the story of Appalachia: never fully benefiting from the rich natural resources that are there,” he said.

The state is at risk of repeating the same mistake, he said, noting that it has already poured more than $250m into the project and that Form Energy won’t have to pay any property taxes on it.

“I imagine at least for the first 10 years of this battery factory’s life, they’re not going to pay any state corporate income tax, very little state taxes at all,” he said.

Despite the many questions ahead, Glyptis of the United Steelworkers said he feels hopeful that the battery plant could help hard-hit Appalachian communities recover from years of disinvestment. He said the Weirton steel mill is an attractive site for developers, located close to highways, a river and an airport, and within a community of skilled tradespeople.

“I think we’ll see this community reinvent itself,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A renewable energy battery plant will rise in West Virginia where a steel mill once stood on Aug 26, 2023.

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