As flooding becomes more common due to the shifting and strengthening weather patterns and sea-level rise associated with climate change, so does climate migration.
New research by the First Street Foundation (FSF) has combined historic population change trends with flood risk data to reveal climate migration patterns happening in areas with high flood risk across the United States.
“Much of the world’s population is exposed to some kind of extreme weather event exacerbated by climate change. These events have been directly connected to impacts on human systems including economic, social, and political crises,” the authors of the study wrote. “Increasing flood exposure and losses are expected to drive population and demographic shifts in the U.S. Some projections estimate that globally, up to 216 million people may migrate due to climate change by 2050.”
The study emphasizes “Climate Abandonment Areas” — areas with population decreases between 2000 and 2020 that can be directly linked to flood risk related to climate change, a press release from FSF said.
The researchers put together population data from the 2020 U.S. Census with the Census Block — property specific data on flood risk from FSF. “Tipping points” were revealed where population change was directly impacted by high flood risk thresholds.
There are 113 million people who live in parts of the country where housing choices have already been affected by flood risk, the most extreme being Climate Abandonment Areas. These areas account for more than 818,000 Census Blocks and lost a total of 3.2 million-plus residents due to flooding from 2000 to 2020.
“There appears to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood level population change,” said Dr. Jeremy Porter, FSF’s head of climate implications research and a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, in the press release. “[T]he downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition, and commercial viability both positively and negatively.”
The study, “Integrating climate change induced flood risk into future population projections,” was published in the journal Nature Communications.
“This research is the first to find a systematic pattern in the historic population change data that shows climate migration is not something that will happen in the future, but it’s something that is already happening in the case of the most likely type of migration (local moves),” Porter told Axios.
In the next three decades, current Climate Abandonment Areas are predicted to lose 2.5 million more residents — an additional 16 percent — due to flood risk. Along with those declines, areas with high flood risk that are still seeing net population growth are projected to experience net population loss later on and become Climate Abandonment Areas.
“[T]he people that can afford to leave, leave, and people [who] can’t afford to leave end up staying in the community,” Porter said, as reported by The Hill. “You end up with a lot of vulnerable populations at risk.”
Emerging Climate Abandonment Areas are expected to reach the risk tipping point soon, eventually losing a total of five million residents — 24 percent of their population — by 2053.
“The population exposure over the next 30 years is a serious concern,” said Evelyn Shu, lead author of the paper and a FSF senior research analyst, in the press release. “For decades we’ve chosen to build and develop in areas that we believed did not have significant risk, but due to the impacts of climate change, those areas are very rapidly beginning to look like areas we’ve avoided in the past.”
The Biden administration has announced a proposal to conserve and restore old-growth trees in United States national forests.
If adopted, the proposal would expand logging restrictions as part of an executive order issued on Earth Day 2022 to safeguard national forests. The protections would be a natural remedy for tackling the effects of climate change, press releases from The White House and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) said.
“Old and mature forests are vital to providing clean water, absorbing carbon pollution, and supplying habitat for wildlife. Today’s actions include a first-of-its kind proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to amend all 128 forest land management plans across the country to conserve and restore old-growth forests across the National Forest System,” The White House said.
The amount of carbon dioxide U.S. forests absorb is equal to more than 10 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
The new proposal, which adds to the over 26 million acres of waters and lands that have already been protected by the administration, will direct the U.S. Forest Service in its restoration and conservation efforts.
“Protecting our old-growth trees from logging is an important first step to ensure these giants continue to store vast amounts of carbon, but other older forests also need protection,” said Randi Spivak, CBD’s public lands policy director, in the CBD press release. “To fulfill President Biden’s executive order and address the magnitude of the climate crisis, the Forest Service also needs to protect our mature forests, which if allowed to grow will become the old growth of tomorrow.”
Most old-growth forests in the U.S. have already been destroyed by logging, and most remaining ancient trees are on public lands managed by the federal government. The Climate Forests Campaign has identified at least 370,000 acres of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands that have been earmarked for timber sales.
“Americans love our forests. They’re natural playgrounds for people and wildlife alike. That’s why more than half a million people this summer asked the Forest Service to protect mature and old-growth trees and forests,” said Ellen Montgomery, Environment America’s public lands campaign director, in the press release from CBD.
The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management manage approximately 80 million mature forest acres and 32 million old-growth acres located on federal lands. Mature forests represent 45 percent of all forests managed by these two federal agencies, with old-growth forests making up 18 percent of the total.
“Mature and old-growth forests are an essential component of a broader climate-crisis solution — but only if we protect them from logging,” said Adam Rissien, WildEarth Guardians rewilding manager, in the CBD press release. “Today’s announcement by the Forest Service establishes necessary and long-overdue protections for old growth forests, limiting when they can be cut and sold commercially. Taking the next step and developing a national rule covering both mature and old-growth would deliver on the Biden administration’s commitment to protect these trees once and for all.”
In addition to the updated amendment to the national forest plan, the Northwest Forest Plan to improve climate resilience for old-growth and mature forest ecosystems will be updated by the Forest Service for the first time since 2007, The White House press release said. Started in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan provides management guidance for federally owned forests in Oregon, Washington and California. These ancient forests contain approximately a quarter of the national forest system’s remaining old-growth trees in the contiguous 48 states.
“The administration has rightly recognized that protecting America’s mature and old-growth trees and forests must be a core part of America’s conservation vision and playbook to combat the climate crisis,” said NRDC senior attorney Garett Rose in the press release from CBD. “This announcement is an important step toward meeting these goals. The Forest Service should move forward to develop the strongest possible safeguards for these forests.”
According to a new analysis by Travel Smart, a campaign by the European Federation for Transport and Environment, about half of over 200 global business firms reduced their business-related travel emissions by over 50% from 2019 to 2022. Much of this reduction in emissions could be attributed to less air travel since the pandemic.
The Travel Smart campaign analyzed travel of 217 global firms from 2019 to 2022. Of the total firms analyzed, 104 were found to reduce travel emissions by at least 50%, in part thanks to virtual meetings that reduced the need for corporate travel amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The analysis found that tech company SAP had the greatest reduction in travel emissions, about 86%, followed by Pfizer with a 78% reduction and PwC with a decline in emissions of about 76%.
On average, business travel emissions for these global firms declined by about 51% from 2019 to 2022, according to the findings.
“Overall it’s a positive picture to see so many companies not returning to pre-2019 levels of flying. Lessons from the pandemic have been learnt: the way forward is collaboration with more online meetings, more travel by train and less by plane,” Denise Auclair, Travel Smart campaign manager, said in a statement.
The European Federation for Transport and Environment noted that business travel emissions need to decline by 50% during this decade compared to pre-pandemic levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target set by the Paris Agreement to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change.
While many companies met and surpassed this goal so far, 113 companies did not cut emissions by half, according to the campaign. The Travel Smart analysis said that JP Morgan Chase had a 13% decline in business travel emissions compared to 2019 levels, followed by Merck at a 17% decline and Johnson & Johnson at a 28% decline.
Twenty-one of the 113 companies even ended up with higher travel-related emissions than pre-pandemic levels, including L3Harris, Boston Scientific and Marriott International, the analysis said.
Had these 113 companies cut business travel emissions by half, the Travel Smart campaign said they could have saved over 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
However, Boston Scientific refuted the findings, telling Reuters, “It reflects the company’s Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) disclosure for business travel prior to Boston Scientific receiving approval of its net-zero, science-based scopes 1, 2 and 3 targets.”
Although global firms have seen an average 50% decline in travel-related emissions since 2019, the Smart Travel campaign is urging the 171 of 217 studied firms that don’t have reduction targets to set a goal to limit emissions by 50% or more. The European Federation for Transport and Environment estimated that aviation emissions could increase by 38% from 2019 to 2050 without technology improvements, more efficient fuels, regulations, and a decline in air travel.
“The era of uncontrolled business flying is coming to an end. Governments are taking notice and cracking down on unnecessary flights. This makes sense for the planet but also for the businesses themselves, who can cut costs and prioritise the well-being of their employees,” Auclair said.
’Tis the season to be merry … and get graded. As students across the country anxiously await their report cards, we thought it would be a good time to ask climate experts to grade the United States’ efforts to address the issue over the last year.
They were more than happy to play along.
“As a professor of sustainability, grading is very much in our working dialog,” one respondent told us. Another chimed in: “I’m finishing up my fall semester class right now, so grades are on my mind.”
The stakes, however, are much greater for the planet than for their students. This almost certainly will go down as the hottest year in recorded history, and the time for meaningful action is drawing short. Although the U.S. showed great effort as the Inflation Reduction Act started to roll out, it fell short of its potential with incomplete work on issues such as permitting reform, not to mention the approval of a massive drilling project in Alaska.
While experts varied in the grade they assigned, everyone agreed the country has a lot of homework to do if it hopes to pass the planet’s hardest test.
Ari Matusiak CEO, Rewiring America
Let’s start with the highest grade, from Ari Matusaik, who leads the electrification nonprofit Rewriting America. In awarding an A-, he hailed the billions of dollars the Department of Energy and other agencies have started allocating under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. The landmark law ushered in a record level of investment in clean energy projects, from solar to battery manufacturing. But even as that money begins flowing, he noted, “we’re already headed in the right direction.”
Bob Inglis Former U.S. Representative, founder of RepublicEn.org
Bob Inglis is an avowed conservative, a former congressman who represented South Carolina, and a devoted proponent of climate action. He awarded the country a “high B+,” in large part because he sees momentum to address climate change building on the political right.
That focus on foreign pollution is of particular interest to Inglis, who would like to see the United States move toward what he called “a carbon border adjustment mechanism” that taxes emissions-intensive imports. The European Union is in the process of implementing such a system, and will initially target sectors such as cement, iron and steel, aluminum, and fertilizers.
“It uses the prize of access to the American market to basically muscle the rest of the world into accountability for negative externalities,” said Inglis, who also founded RepublicEn.org to promote market-driven solutions to the climate crisis. But enacting that may take time, especially with a party beholden to the politics of former President Donald Trump, who Inglis referred to as the “death angel in Republican primaries.”
Jean Su Director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund
One grade landed squarely in the middle of the spectrum: a C from Jean Su, the energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.
Su praised the Biden administration’s announcement that it is ramping up efforts to curb emissions from methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide in the 20 years after its release into the atmosphere. She also heaped plaudits on the IRA’s funding for renewable energy and community solar, as well as more stringent fuel efficiency requirements for cars and light trucks.
“However,” she said, “the Biden administration’s fossil fuel record undermines those strides.”
Like others, she was disappointed by the administration’s approval of the Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope. That project is expected to release more than 249 million tons of CO2 over 30 years once the 600 million barrels it produces are drilled and burned. That’s the equivalent of adding some 2 million cars to the road annually. She also condemned its green-lighting of liquefied natural gas exports, as well as its support for a controversial natural gas pipeline in Appalachia.
A recent Center for Biological Diversity analysis, she noted, found that fossil fuel projects approved by the Biden administration “threaten to erase the climate emissions progress from the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies.”
Ramanan Krishnamoorti Vice president of energy and innovation at the University of Houston
The only thing that spared the nation from earning an F from Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a chemistry and petroleum engineering professor, was the generous curve he used. His litany of laments was long.
For starters, the United States still hasn’t made meaningful progress on reforming the permitting process for new electricity transmission. “No projects at scale are likely to move forward without this,” he warned. Although the White House made an attempt at this sorely needed step, that effort has been bogged down in congressional politics.
Interest rates have been another drag, he added. Higher rates have made it a lot more challenging for investors to support new clean energy projects such as offshore wind. And even if there was more momentum to break ground, he fears there aren’t adequate plans to supply the workers needed to construct them. “We have not truly developed at scale programs that will deliver the right workforces at the right time for the projects,” he wrote.
Even the year’s bright spot — EV sales — is dimming in what Krishnamoorti dubs a cooling of “the best story of climate progress.” Some hurdles he sees impeding wider adoption include supply chain issues, the cost of EVs, and inadequate infrastructure. Cutting charging times further would help, too.
The rise of NIMBYism is another concern for Krishnamoorti. He attributes opposition to things like wind and solar farms to a “sugarcoating of the bottlenecks and the tradeoffs that are necessary for the energy transition — there is a narrative that energy transition technologies do not require tradeoffs and there are no bottlenecks.”
“NIMBYism is dictating every project,” he remarked. “Unless there is clarity on the true cost of U.S. climate programs and the impacts it will have — we will not move forward.”
Anna Liljedahl Associate scientist, Woodwell Climate Research Center
Anna Liljedahl, a hydrologist with focus on the Arctic, had no qualms about failing the U.S. Her reasoning was straightforward: Many patents, including climate technologies that would help mitigate the problem, are locked away from public view. Although patents are a matter of public record, they grant those holding them exclusive rights to the technology and prevent others from developing or commercially exploiting it for years.
“I bet many are on alternative and low-cost energy solutions,” she said. “Until that confidentiality is lifted, I am giving our country the lowest grade possible — no matter what else happened during the year.”
Daniel Kammen Physicist and professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, said it’s unclear exactly what the U.S. grade should be, given its mixed performance. For that reason, he’s awarding an incomplete.
He echoed the near universal praise others had for the Inflation Reduction Act, but said the impact of that landmark climate legislation remains unrealized. Any gains that might have come from the Biden administration’s signature bill were at least somewhat offset by its approval of the Willow project.
Still, Kammen saw the potential for real progress in the climate agreement the United States and China signed last month. In finding rare common ground on the issue, the two superpowers agreed to “sufficiently accelerate” the deployment of clean energy in a bid to begin displacing fossil fuels and address the climate crisis.
“The U.S.-China Sunnylands Agreement could reset the international climate investment and progress effort,” Kammen said.
Bill McKibben Climate activist, author, and, yes, an emeritus member of the Grist board
Kammen wasn’t only one doling out incompletes. Although environmentalist Bill McKibben lauded the investments already made under the IRA, he called such efforts just “half the assignment.”
“[They] completely punted on the other half — the dirty energy side,” said McKibben, the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. But, he added, there are ways to make up for it — particularly by reining in recent efforts to build out the domestic production capacity of liquified natural gas.
“A decision to block new export licenses for LNG permits would be the biggest single move possible on our planet right now to slow the fossil fuel juggernaut,” he wrote. “And give them lots and lots of extra credit.”
Climate scientist Kate Marvel wasn’t terribly impressed with the country’s efforts and also gave the U.S. an incomplete. Although the general trendline is headed in the right direction, the nation’s efforts lack urgency. “Total emissions in the U.S. are falling (mostly due to declines in coal) but nowhere near fast enough to meet Paris Agreement targets,” she said.
Although she noted that federal legislation such as the IRA, bipartisan infrastructure act, and the CHIPs Act have all helped to accelerate the deployment of clean energy, the need for faster action became abundantly clear in 2023. “The toll of climate disasters this year was heavy: deadly wildfires, devastating floods, brutal heat waves, and smoky skies,” Marvel said. “Climate change has come to the U.S., and the warming is accelerating. Let’s hope climate action accelerates, too.”
Over the course of its 75-year history, the World Bank has been the go-to organization for solving global crises: It was charged with rebuilding Europe after the Second World War, and then again with reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan after they were invaded by the U.S. During the global economic downturn of the 1970s, it loaned poor countries millions of dollars with the stated purpose of ending third world poverty. And earlier this month, the institution was picked to manage one of the most monumental tasks of the century: dispensing climate reparations to the developing world.
The World Bank’s role managing this so-called loss-and-damage fund was formalized on the very first day of COP28, this year’s United Nations climate conference, which just concluded in the United Arab Emirates. The fund, which provides a trove of money for relatively poor countries that have emitted little carbon yet disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change, was capitalized with more than $650 million in just a few days after the start of the conference.
But this success came after a string of furious debates, in which representatives from several coastal and low-income nations expressed vehement opposition to the World Bank’s management of the fund. When developing countries finally agreed that the Bank could host the fund on an interim basis for the next four years, they included a long list of conditions that the institution must meet. The deal was struck largely due to attrition, after weeks of negotiations in which wealthy nations, largely led by the U.S., rejected an alternative to set up a standalone fund.
Grist spoke with former World Bank employees, COP28 negotiators, and watchdog groups to understand the opposition to the World Bank’s role in the unprecedented effort to pay out climate reparations from the new loss-and-damage fund. Experts unanimously agreed that developing countries have little trust in the World Bank as a result of its governing structure, which gives the U.S. outsized influence, as well as the failures of its past programs, which led to debt crises that compounded poverty in many developing nations during the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the Bank’s track record as a major investor in fossil fuel projects around the world has led some critics to question its fitness for a position meant to battle climate change.
“The structure of the international organizations [like the World Bank] reflects a global power structure that is no longer the case, no longer true,” said Paul Cadario, a 37-year veteran of the World Bank who is now a distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto. “It doesn’t give sufficient weight to the concerns of the Global South. Those concerns are inevitably going to wash over something as specific as the loss-and-damage fund.”
The World Bank’s primary function is that of a credit institution — a bank like any other. Given its creditworthiness, the bank borrows money at low interest rates, which it then loans to developing nations. It is in part this setup that has sounded alarms among potential loss-and-damage fund recipients: Grantmaking and fund management, two integral components of the loss-and-damage effort, are not core functions of the bank. While the exact extent to which the loss-and-damage funding will take the form of no-strings-attached grants versus interest-bearing loans is unclear, developing nations have argued vehemently against loans that would further trap heavily indebted nations.
The World Bank has gained some relevant experience over the last few decades, as it’s taken responsibility for the management of a handful of funds designed to provide capital to developing countries trying to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to a warming world. As the trustee of these funds, the bank is responsible for fundraising and allocating the money raised. A loss-and-damage fund would likely work the same way: The bank would appeal to various donor countries for funds, which it would then pass on to developing nations for specific projects.
But the bank has historically been slow to deploy these funds. The Green Climate Fund was established by climate negotiators at COP16 in 2010 to help developing countries tackle the climate crisis. It’s the largest multilateral fund of its kind and has received about $33 billion in pledges so far. But countries in need have had difficulty accessing the money, because project approvals take several years. The Philippines, a low-lying archipelago threatened by sea-level rise and typhoons, had just one of seven projects it proposed over seven years approved in 2021.
“The process is extremely slow and very bureaucratic,” said Rohit Khanna, a former manager of global energy programs at the World Bank who also helped set up one of the bank’s climate funds. “The Green Climate Fund Secretariat is quite risk averse. The Secretariat is just anxious that if something goes wrong, the fund will die in its infancy.” (The Secretariat is a World Bank employee who manages the day-to-day operations of the fund.)
The highly bureaucratic process is a burden for developing countries, said Michai Robertson, a negotiator for small island states like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Barbados. The bank often had lengthy reporting requirements to guard against fraud and corruption, and at times it made well-meaning but impractical information requests, he added. In one case, the bank asked for 30 years of weather data in conflict zones where such data did not exist. Robertson attributed the logjams to “a lack of trust in developing countries and their systems.”
“It’s very colonial in its mindset,” he added.
In exchange for running the funds, the bank charges fees that are primarily used to pay its staff, many of whom live in expensive cities like Washington, D.C., and New York. In recent years, those costs have been increasing. The bank increased its fees from 12 percent to 17 percent, calculated as a percentage of the Secretariat’s operational costs for running the Global Partnership for Education fund a few years ago. More recently, it tried to increase those costs to 24 percent before they were negotiated down to about 20 percent.
“I don’t think the bank is transparent” about its fee structure, said Khanna. “The bank is not cheap, that’s for sure. The fees are high, and part of it is just the fact that you’re paying for a lot of stuff in Washington, D.C.” Khanna said costs in the low teens for the loss-and-damage fund would be acceptable, but anything as high as 24 percent would be “outrageous.”
The objection to the World Bank’s involvement in the loss-and-damage fund goes beyond its high fees and bureaucracy. Its critics charge more broadly that the institution has consistently pushed programs that have impoverished vast swaths of the developing world.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. At a two-week conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which was organized by the U.S. and British governments, leaders from 44 countries gathered to find ways to rebuild international currencies sunk by the war and “to promote worldwide reconstruction.” Initially, that meant promoting policies that favored substantial government intervention in the economy. In the decades after its founding, the World Bank encouraged countries in the Global South to take out millions of dollars in loans to dam rivers and erect power stations, assuring them that the new infrastructure would increase export revenue by enabling industrial production and pull their people out of poverty.
That plan did not pan out, according to University of Minnesota professor Michael Goldman, who has written one of the seminal books about the World Bank. While the bank pushed many developing countries to invest in industries that ultimately did not have longevity, rich nations’ hunger for many of the Global South’s key commodities began to dwindle. The commodities that had generated export revenue for developing countries were largely replaced by cheap synthetic alternatives: corn syrup instead of sugar, polyester instead of cotton, particle board instead of timber.As the market value of these commodities plummeted, poor nations’ foreign debt ballooned, reaching $1 trillion by 1986.
Rather than diminishing the World Bank’s stature, however, the global debt crisis placed the bank in the position of solving the colossal problem that it had a dominant hand in creating.
Governments in the developing world started borrowing large sums just to pay off the interest on their old loans. But these new loans came at a steep cost: The World Bank was stacked with people who believed that state-led development had failed and a free market approach would benefit indebted nations. As a result, the bank promised to bail out poor countries on the condition that they implement specific economic policies that, while on their face were intended to pull countries out of debt, ultimately served the interests of wealthy northern nations by allowing foreign companies to privatize public sectors.
These 1990s-era “structural adjustment programs,” as they were known, marked a radical departure from the World Bank’s founding ideology. Rather than push for government intervention in developing markets, the bank ordered borrowers to liberalize their economies by eliminating trade restrictions and allowing foreign companies to privatize previously public functions like electricity and mining. In the ensuing decade, people living in the borrowing countries struggled under policies that also saw the elimination of critical government subsidies and social welfare programs.
“It was considered ‘the lost decade’ because of the austerity programs the World Bank implemented to get back its money to repay its investors,” Goldman told Grist. In Mexico, for example, the government was forced to take out structural adjustment loans after racking up $80 billion in debt to U.S. banks by 1982. Provisions in the loans “completely revamped the Mexican state and economy, eliminating food subsidies, rural public agencies, national food security systems, and state-owned food monopolies,” Goldman wrote in his book, Imperial Nature.
The ideology behind structural adjustment — which promoted market liberalization, state austerity, and public sector privatization — permeated every arm of the World Bank during the 1980s, according to Robert Wade, a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. When Wade started working at the institution in 1984, he had already lived in Taiwan and South Korea, where government intervention in the economy had improved the prospects of millions of people. At the bank, however, he found that no one was interested in these success stories. He departed four years later, “with the sense that the World Bank was ideologically driven in a direction that I thought was inappropriate for developing countries,” Wade told Grist.
Structural adjustment is now widely considered a resounding failure among economists and development analysts. Since the turn of the millennium, the World Bank has shifted in new directions, focusing more on promoting good governance and “sustainable development.” But Wade told Grist that, at its core, the institution is still dominated by the perspectives and interests of rich countries. He pointed to the World Bank’s power structure: It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., its president is typically an American citizen handpicked by the U.S. president, and the U.S. is the only country to have a de facto right of veto at the bank. To this day, the U.S. remains the bank’s largest shareholder, providing more capital to the bank than any other country.
According to Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, the average individual in the global South has one-eighth of the voting power in the World Bank as their counterpart in the global North. As a result, the bank’s hosting of the loss-and-damage fund would mean that the countries that have contributed the most to climate change would have the most power to administer the reparations for the harm they have caused.
“They’re playing a double game,” Wade said. “Western nations have a collective interest in pretending that they’re committed to giving money to this fund” while structuring it in a way that minimizes what they actually have to pay. That became clear at COP28 earlier this week, when delegates agreed to adopt a loss-and-damage fund that will start at $429 million — a small fraction of what developing countries say they will need to make up for the economic impacts of climate change. The U.S. in particular came under fire for offering up a paltry $17.5 million. (The United Arab Emirates and Germany, by comparison, each pledged $100 million). The cost of Pakistan’s devastating floods during the summer of 2022 were estimated to be around $40 billion alone.
To protect the loss-and-damage fund from the idiosyncrasies of the World Bank, developing nation negotiators set out some conditions that the bank has to meet. They include autonomy for the board that would oversee the fund, access to the fund for all developing countries, and fees that are “reasonable and appropriate.”
“What we agreed to was that rather than trying to shove ourselves into existing World Bank structures, we would establish a set of conditions that the World Bank must meet if it is to be the interim host,” said Avinash Persaud, special climate envoy and negotiator for Barbados. “If the World Bank doesn’t do a good job — and I’m not saying it won’t — then sacking the World Bank” is a possibility, he added.
A new law in Seattle marks the latest in a wave of local efforts to electrify homes and other buildings. Under the city’s Building Emissions Performance Standard, signed into law last week, all existing commercial and multifamily residential buildings over 20,000 square feet will need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Meeting that target will effectively require building owners to replace oil and gas-powered furnaces, water heaters, gas stoves, and other appliances with electric alternatives like heat pumps and induction stoves. Buildings in Seattle generate 37 percent of the city’s total emissions, and the new law is expected to slash that number by more than a quarter.
Seattle’s ordinance reflects a growing push to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in buildings, which would reduce indoor air pollution and cut carbon emissions. But some other local electrification policies have hit a wall. In April, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation ban on natural gas in new buildings. The ruling caused several cities across the 9th Circuit region, which spans 11 western states and territories including California, Oregon, and Washington, to suspend similar policies. Yet despite the setback, clean energy experts told Grist that governments still have plenty of options to electrify buildings. Cities and states like Seattle; Ashland, Oregon; and Washington state are sidestepping Berkeley’s legal challenges by finding creative alternatives to banning gas outright — including by setting emissions targets, updating building codes, and restricting indoor air pollution.
“Elected officials’ and regulators’ resolve to address this issue has not gone away,” said Dylan Plummer, a senior field organizing strategist with the Sierra Club. “They just need to work through new avenues that are legally defensible.”
In 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the country to ban new buildings from connecting to natural gas lines. The California Restaurant Association quickly mobilized to file a lawsuit against the city for its policy, backed with more than $1 million in funding from SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility. In 2021, a federal district court ruled against the restaurant industry, but in April 2023, a panel of three judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision, shooting down Berkeley’s ordinance. The judges ruled that because national efficiency standards for appliances under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act prevent cities and states from setting their own standards, local governments can’t ban infrastructure to prevent the use of fossil fuel-powered appliances.
Outside the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, California, in 2017. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
“The decision does not make a lot of sense legally,” Jan Hasselman, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, wrote at the time. Since the ruling, other cities in California, including Encinitas, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo, have pulled back their own natural gas bans. Eugene, which was the first city in Oregon to adopt a natural gas ban modeling Berkeley’s, also suspended its ordinance in June. The Berkeley city attorney’s office has requested a rehearing of the case before 11 judges on the 9th Circuit, which could result in a new decision.
In the meantime, Hasselman told Grist that building emissions standards like the one passed in Seattle are one way for cities to dodge legal hurdles by avoiding an explicit ban on gas. The Seattle policy sets benchmarks that ramp up every five years for large buildings to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and lets building owners decide how they want to reach those standards. Theoretically, they could hold onto their oil and gas appliances, though Plummer pointed out that avoiding electrification will likely become more and more difficult over time. Commercial buildings covered under Seattle’s new law must reach net-zero emissions by 2045, and multi-family buildings by 2050 — a requirement that would effectively require swapping out fossil fuel appliances with heat pumps and other electric options. (Carbon offsets purchased by utilities would be allowed to count toward buildings’ net-zero calculations.) A handful of other cities have also passed building performance standards to cut emissions, including Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Updating building energy codes is another viable way for cities to pursue electrification without running afoul of the 9th Circuit ruling, Hasselman said. Recent changes to Washington state’s building energy codes, which set minimum efficiency standards for buildings, will soon require new buildings to achieve the same energy performance as buildings that use electric heat pumps. Much like Seattle’s new building standards, the update does not explicitly require builders to install heat pumps, although “it also actively makes gas pretty impractical,” said Hasselman. The legal somersault was intentional: Washington state policymakers delayed and revised the new codes in response to the 9th Circuit’s ruling, since a previous draft would have mandated heat pump installation.
Solaris Energy employees install a heat pump at a home in Folkestone, U.K., on September 20, 2021. Andrew Aitchison / In pictures via Getty Images
Creating stricter indoor air quality standards is another option to phase out fossil fuel appliances without explicitly banning them, Hasselman said. Ashland, Oregon, is currently considering setting maximum thresholds for indoor air pollutants like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and methane emissions that would effectively eliminate the burning of fossil fuels in buildings. In March, California’s Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution in nine counties in the San Francisco metropolitan area, adopted rules to phase out sales of gas furnaces and water heaters that produce nitrogen oxide emissions, citing health impacts including coughing, wheezing, and a higher risk of asthma attacks.
Meanwhile, opposition from the gas industry continues to loom over the movement to “electrify everything.” In the past few years, at least 24 states have passed laws to prevent local governments from banning gas in buildings, galvanized by support from trade groups like the American Gas Association and gas utilities like Dominion Energy. In Eugene, Oregon, the gas utility NW Natural funded a highly coordinated campaign to oppose the city’s natural gas ban. But even with ongoing legal challenges and industry pushback, Hasselman said that Seattle’s new law “reflects how unstoppable the shift is towards electrification.”
“Momentum was slowed for a bit, but it’s picking back up as cities and local governments lead into the future, away from burning gas in homes,” he said. “And that is the future. It’s just a matter of how fast it’s going to happen.”
The Canadian province of Ottawa is planning to announce new automobile regulations — the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard — this week, while the Canadian government is set to unveil a requirement that all new cars must be zero emissions by 2035, according to a senior government source, as Reuters reported.
The Electric Vehicle Availability Standard would help to shorten electric vehicle (EV) wait times, as well as make sure the Canadian market has available supply, the source told Reuters.
Québec and British Columbia have already implemented the measures.
Zero-emissions vehicles include plug-in, battery electric and hydrogen models. According to the regulations, these will be required to make up 20 percent of all new vehicle sales in 2026, 60 percent in 2030 and 100 percent by 2035, the anonymous source said.
“This is helping to solve one of the greatest barriers to EVs uptake: that wait times are too long,” the source said, as reported by the Toronto Star. “We are making sure that supply is going toward Canadian markets, because one of the issues with EVs is that we’re competing against other markets where the actual EVs are being shipped to.”
EV sales worldwide account for approximately 13 percent of all vehicle sales, Reuters reported. According to the International Energy Agency, EV sales will probably comprise 40 to 45 percent of the market by 2030.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted recently to stop the Biden administration from implementing vehicle emissions standards that would lead to 67 percent of all new vehicles in the country being EVs by 2032.
Under the new Canadian regulations, automakers but not dealerships will earn credits for how many EVs they sell, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The number of credits will differ depending on how close cars are to the zero-emissions standard.
Credits will also be available for automakers that assist with the production of EV charging infrastructure. Early credits will be awarded to those who manufacture EVs ahead of when the regulations are set to start in 2026. Companies will be able to buy or sell credits if they come up short or go over their goals.
According to the record of registrations from Statistics Canada, one out of eight new vehicles sold in the country is an EV or plug-in hybrid, reported the Toronto Star. Sales are much higher in provinces that have already put regulations in place requiring a set proportion of EVs to be sold by dealers. In Québec, a fifth of new cars are electric, and in British Columbia, almost a quarter of new car sales are EVs.
“By doing this nationally, we will make sure supply is available and that consumers in all provinces are going to get quicker access to the vehicles,” the official said, as the Toronto Star reported.
Demand for coal is predicted to decline beginning in 2026, according to the most recent coal market report — Coal 2023 Analysis and forecast to 2026 — from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It is the first time the report has projected a drop, a press release from the IEA said.
“Today, coal remains the largest energy source for electricity generation, steelmaking and cement production – maintaining a central role in the world economy. At the same time, coal is the largest source of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and curbing consumption is essential to meeting international climate targets,” the report said. “A historic turning point could arrive soon. The International Energy Agency’s latest projections see coal demand peaking within this decade under today’s policy settings, primarily as a result of the structural decline in coal use in developed economies and a weaker economic outlook for China, which has also pledged to reach a peak in CO2 emissions before 2030.”
The report projects coal demand globally will increase by 1.4 percent this year, for the first time surpassing 9.37 billion tons, the press release said. The increase hides large differences between regions; most advanced economies are set to see a decline in consumption this year, including record reductions in the United States and the European Union of approximately 20 percent each. At the same time, developing and emerging economies will see continued strong demand for coal, with a five percent increase in China and an eight percent increase in India because of weak contributions from hydropower and an increasing electricity demand.
The report predicts coal demand to fall globally by 2.3 percent by 2026, as compared to 2023 levels, even if governments do not announce and implement more strict climate and clean energy policies. The decline in reliance on coal will be driven by renewable energy capacity expansion up to 2026.
“We have seen declines in global coal demand a few times, but they were brief and caused by extraordinary events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Covid-19 crisis. This time appears different, as the decline is more structural, driven by the formidable and sustained expansion of clean energy technologies,” said Keisuke Sadamori, IEA’s director of energy markets and security.
More than half of the expansion of renewable energy will happen in China, which also accounts for more than half the global demand for coal. Because of this change, coal demand in the country is predicted to decrease next year and reach a plateau through 2026. China’s coal forecast will be affected greatly by the deployment rate of clean energy, structural shifts in the economy and weather conditions in the coming years.
“The report finds that the shift in coal demand and production to Asia is accelerating. This year, China, India and Southeast Asia are set to account for three-quarters of global consumption, up from only about one-quarter in 1990. Consumption in Southeast Asia is expected to exceed for the first time that of the United States and that of the European Union in 2023,” the press release said.
It is projected that the three biggest coal producers in the world — Indonesia, China and India — will break production records this year, moving global output to a record high. The three nations are responsible for upwards of 70 percent of the world’s coal production.
“Through 2026, India and Southeast Asia are the only regions where coal consumption is poised to grow significantly. In advanced economies, the expansion of renewables amid weak electricity demand growth is set to continue driving the structural decline of coal consumption,” according to the press release.
The report said global consumption is predicted to continue to be well over 8.82 billion tons through 2026. In order to decrease emissions at a rate in keeping with Paris Agreement goals, relentless coal use would need to fall much more quickly.
“A turning point for coal is clearly on the horizon – though the pace at which renewables expand in key Asian economies will dictate what happens next, and much greater efforts are needed to meet international climate targets,” Sadamori said.
