Was Texas Storm Yet Another Product of Climate Change?

Winter Storm Uri, which delivered the lowest temperatures North Texas has seen in 72 years, proves it once and for all: Global warming is a hoax!

Actually, climate science is more complicated. And there is no consensus yet that the extreme cold that invaded the South is a result, in whole or in part, of climate change. 

But a number of scientists believe that climate change is playing a significant role. 

“There is evidence that climate change can weaken the polar vortex, which allows more chances for frigid Arctic air to ooze into the Lower 48,” University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd told USA Today.

While the vortex is a natural phenomenon, and polar vortex breakdowns happen naturally, there is likely an element of climate change at work, USA Today’s Doyle Rice wrote.

Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis, who has published a study on the phenomenon, said in 2019 that "warm temperatures in the Arctic cause the jet stream to take these wild swings, and when it swings farther south, that causes cold air to reach farther south."

The jet stream is the river of air up in the atmosphere that steers weather around. A study in 2015 in the journal Science reported that the rapid warming of the Arctic makes for a wavier jet stream, with waves that move more slowly across the globe. When that happens, cold Arctic air sometimes pours down over the U.S.

In an email to Vox, Francis said that the bitter chill is a sign of what’s to come. “The large, persistent, southward dip in the jet stream responsible for this cold invasion is likely to happen more frequently in a warming climate, as are the warmer-than-normal spells that sit alongside this dip,” Francis said.

Both extreme heat and extreme cold can happen side by side, with the meandering jet stream acting as a barrier in between, wrote Vox’s Umair Irfan. 

“The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly generational,” said Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural,” he told The Guardian. “This is happening not in spite of climate change; it’s in part due to climate change.”

Last year, Cohen co-authored a paper that found a strong uptick in winter storms in the Northeast in the decade leading up to 2018. This, Cohen and some other scientists argue, is a symptom of heating in the Arctic, occurring at a rate more than twice the global average, that is disrupting long-established climatic systems.

The crisis sounded an alarm for power systems throughout the country, Brad Plumer wrote in The New York Times. Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure. It is clear, he wrote, that global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems nationwide, including fiercer heat waves and water shortages.

“It’s essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy,” Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University, told The Times. “What makes this problem even harder is that we’re now in a world where, especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected.”

Adapting to those risks could carry a hefty price tag, Plumer noted, citing a recent study that found that the Southeast alone may need 35 percent more electric capacity by 2050 simply to deal with the known hazards of climate change.

Will we build that capacity with fossil fuels or clean energy? Every kilowatt hour we produce with fossil fuels will worsen climate change. To speed the transition to renewables, we should rely on the tool that most economists say will be the quickest, simplest, and most efficient: an honest price on carbon. Congress needs to face that reality and take action. 

Wind Power Reaches New Heights

February brought upbeat climate news from New York City: The Empire State Building and 13 other buildings owned by the Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) are now powered solely by wind.

ESRT has a portfolio of more than 10 million square feet and now ranks as the nation’s biggest real estate user of entirely renewable energy. 

To be precise, this does not mean that the 14 properties will be hooked up to wind turbines that will directly feed them electricity. Instead, as IFLScience explained, ESRT will effectively be paying for energy to be sourced from renewable sources in order to cover the electricity its properties use. The new deal will ensure that a kilowatt-hour of green energy will be added to the grid for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used in ESRT buildings. The company is buying the power from Green Mountain Energy and Direct Energy.

The energy needed to operate buildings is among the nation’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. In New York, buildings generate more than two-thirds of the city’s carbon emissions, Sarah Kaplan reported in The Washington Post.

Bottom line: ESRT will prevent the production of 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing all New York City taxis from the road for a year.

This is not the first time ESRT took a bold leadership step on climate, Kaplan noted. A decade-long “deep carbon” retrofit enabled the Empire State Building to cut its planet-warming emissions by about 40 percent. The skyscraper itself has run on renewable energy since 2011.

The move to renewable power was as much a business decision as an environmental one, said Anthony Malkin, the trust’s chief executive. Many of ESRT’s existing tenants had been asking about switching to greener energy sources. And a growing number of companies — including some that rent space in ESRT buildings — have adopted corporate sustainability initiatives that include commitments to reduce their carbon footprints. “We want to differentiate ourselves so we get better tenants at higher rents so we can outperform our competition,” Malkin told The Post. “It’s all market driven.”

This move is an important symbolic victory for renewables, said Cyndy Reynolds, commercial sales director for Green Mountain Energy. “When you have someone like ESRT who you know is going to look at every facet, whether it’s cost or reliability, and they decide to move forward … it’s not just a PR play at that point,” Reynolds told Kaplan. “It’s so important to have examples like ESRT to show the nation that renewable power options are affordable and, dare I say, competitive,” she said.

Wind is the most-used renewable energy source in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration, generating about 9 percent of the nation’s electricity last year.

Data from the financial advisory company Lazard shows that new wind power facilities are cheaper to build and operate than almost all kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure, even without government subsidies. If you factor in tax credits and other incentives, generating wind can cost as little as $9 per 1,000 kilowatt-hours, compared to at least $23 at natural gas power plants.

Meantime, New York State is moving quickly to develop wind power off its coastline. There are five projects in active development--the largest offshore wind pipeline in the nation, totaling more than 4,300 megawatts and representing nearly 50 percent of the capacity needed to meet New York’s offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035.

And there was important news about wind energy production February 3 from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. It will resume the permitting process for Vineyard Wind's proposed wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, with electricity likely to be produced by late 2023. "Offshore wind has the potential to help our nation combat climate change, improve resilience through reliable power, and spur economic development to create good-paying jobs," said BOEM Director Amanda Lefton, who was named head of the agency February 1.

While there is progress being made, the transition to clean energy would move even more quickly if the nation were to put a price on carbon. We are urging Congress to take that step and encourage you to deliver that message to those who represent you on Capitol Hill.

Cost of US Natural Disasters Broke Record in 2020

Do you know someone--maybe your congressman--who’s wringing his hands about President Biden’s proposals to invest significant sums in clean energy, green infrastructure, and other climate-related initiatives?

If you do, refer him to the report that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just issued on the cost of natural disasters last year. A record 22 weather and climate-related disasters caused damages of more than $1 billion apiece. Altogether, last year’s natural disasters in the United States accounted for $95 billion in damages (almost double the amount in 2019), killing 262 people and injuring many more, NOAA reported.

Compare the number of billion-dollars-in-damages natural disasters last year (22) to the annual average since 1980: seven.  It sounds like strong federal action is in order.

Last year featured a record number of named Atlantic storms, as well as the largest wildfires ever recorded in California. Take a look at NOAA’s graphic summarizing the year’s disasters.

“Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,” Ernst Rauch, the chief climate scientist at Munich Re, told Christopher Flavelle of The New York Times. Munich Re is one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. The insurance industry is struggling to determine risk and to price its products as extreme weather exacts a growing toll on people and property.

The 30 named Atlantic storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year. Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August. 

As Rauch explained in The Times’ story, the 2020 hurricane season was unusually devastating because climate change is making storms more likely to stall once they hit land, pumping more rain and wind into coastal towns and cities for longer periods of time.

The next costliest category of natural disasters in 2020 was convective storms, which generated $40 billion in losses. This category includes thunderstorms, derechos, tornadoes, and hailstorms. A derecho that struck Iowa and other Midwestern states in August caused almost $7 billion in damage, destroying huge amounts of corn and soybeans.

Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Fires burned more than four million acres across California, doubling the record set in 2018. The August Complex Fire burned more than one million acres, by far the most in state history, Scientific American reported. 

Last year’s fires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed, Munich Re said, but also because so much of that damage was outside of California. For example, 4,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in Oregon. In Colorado, the Cameron Peak Fire was the largest in state history, burning more than 208,000 acres. The state’s second-largest in history, the Pine Gulch Fire, also occurred in 2020.

David Romps, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, told James Temple of MIT Technology Review that we are living in a fundamentally climate-altered world. “To cut to the chase,” Romps said: “Were the heat wave and the lightning strikes and the dryness of the vegetation affected by global warming? Absolutely yes. Were they made significantly hotter, more numerous, and drier because of global warming? Yes, likely yes, and yes.”

Since 1980, when NOAA began tracking billion-dollar disasters, every state has had at least one. Texas leads the pack, with a stunning 124.

We can expect things to get even worse. The Biden administration and Congress need to take action immediately, and one of the steps they should take is to put an honest price on carbon emissions. Please urge your representatives on Capitol Hill to support such efforts.

BIDEN URGED TO SET UP NATIONAL CLIMATE COUNCIL

For those of us convinced that the United States must take immediate and strong actions to counter climate change, help is on the way. President-elect Joe Biden has nominated a number of leaders with climate expertise, and the selections indicate that he wants to take a whole-of-government approach to this central challenge.

Biden appears to have taken cues from a 300-page blueprint laying out a holistic approach to the climate. Drawn up by the Climate 21 Project, it took a year and a half to develop, and its recommendations, The Washington Post reported, include creating a White House National Climate Council that is “co-equal” to the Domestic Policy Council and National Economic Council.

Creating a well-structured National Climate Council (NCC), the report maintained, “would publicly elevate climate change as an issue of sustained national importance in the next Administration and beyond. Establishing an NCC would also make it unequivocally clear to the Cabinet, the Congress, business leaders, activists, and the general public who within the White House is principally responsible for organizing and executing on climate change policy.”

As envisioned by the Climate 21 Project, an assistant to the president for climate change would direct the NCC, while a deputy would be principally responsible for mitigation policy. In addition there would be three special assistants overseeing: 1) international policy; 2) policies related to the clean energy transition, the energy workforce, and tax and financial-sector issues; and 3) coordination with the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). 

One of our co-founders, former Idaho Congressman Walt Minnick (D), endorses such an approach. Back in 1971, he served as staff director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, established by President Richard Nixon to tackle the emerging global crisis involving heroin and other illicit drugs. The committee formulated new federal policies designed to curtail the flow of these drugs into the United States, creating the Drug Enforcement Administration and new federal drug treatment agencies. Its members included appropriate Cabinet members, agency heads and senior White House staff. “The problem was so serious and so broad,” said Minnick, “that you needed to directly engage the president and enlist the heads of a broad range of federal departments and agencies to solve it. A like approach and priority is essential to deal with a challenge as enormous as climate change.”

The most striking aspect of Biden’s approach is his determination to incorporate climate in his economic policies. “Climate change is going to touch every part of our economy, and climate change policy is going to require us to change the way we power and fuel every part of our economy,” said Joseph E. Aldy, a Harvard University economist who served as special assistant to President Barack Obama on energy and environment.

Officials at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged Biden and Congress to include clean energy components in an infrastructure package in a news briefing earlier this year. “That could be a big piece in the stimulus negotiations,” said Tim Profeta, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a co-author of the Climate 21 Project’s blueprint.

“Our economic understanding of climate action has evolved over the past decade,” Andrew Steer, president of World Resources Institute, wrote in a Fortune magazine op-ed. “We have strong evidence that climate policies promote strong and equitable economic growth. Smart action on climate change will increase economic efficiency, drive innovation and new technologies, and reduce investment risks. This is why Biden said on the campaign trail that when he thinks of climate change, he sees jobs. And it’s why many labor unions and manufacturers have gotten behind Biden’s proposed climate plans.” 

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomber is also advocating a whole-of-government approach. He recently published an op-ed arguing that some of the most important steps the new administration could take “have nothing to do with the Environmental Protection Agency” and involve measures like incorporating climate impacts into the Housing and Urban Development’s building standards and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s disclosure requirements. 

The Department of Agriculture is yet another agency that can play a major role in climate, in part because it oversees the 193 million-acre National Forest System. "The agriculture sector accounts for about 10% of current overall U.S. emissions, while U.S forests sequester the equivalent of about 15% of carbon dioxide emissions from combustion of U.S. fossil fuels annually," according to the Climate 21 Project. 

Biden sent an immediate signal that he is ambitious about tackling climate when he named former Secretary of State John Kerry as the nation’s international climate czar. “Climate change is the national security, public health, environmental, and moral issue of our time, and there is no one better suited to coordinate a bold international response to this crisis than John Kerry,” said Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). 

Biden said that Kerry “will be matched with a high-level White House climate policy coordinator and policymaking structure...that will lead efforts here in the United States to combat the climate crisis and mobilize action to meet the existential threat that we face.”

We continue to believe, as do most leading economists, that a price on carbon is the most efficient and quickest way to make progress on the climate front. We will be carrying that message to Capitol Hill and the new administration.

YELLEN CAN HELP FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE

Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to serve as Treasury secretary, is committed to tackling climate change and believes that a carbon price is critical to the success of that mission. 

“As an early backer of the Kyoto Protocol,” noted Dino Grandoni of The Washington Post, “Yellen saw climate change as a risk to the financial system back in the late 1990s, when she was a top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton.”

She is a founding member of the bipartisan Climate Leadership Council, whose top priority is passage of a carbon fee, with all proceeds returned to citizens as “dividends.” The council’s leaders include GOP icons such as James Baker and George Shultz, both former secretaries of the Treasury, and among CLC’s corporate members are Ford, ExxonMobil, and Procter & Gamble. As part of her work with CLC, Yellen led a bipartisan group of  economists to sign a letter endorsing a carbon tax. So far, 3,589 economists have signed it.

She co-chaired the Group of 30 Working Group on Climate Change and Finance, which released a report in October urging governments, regulators and financial companies to make moves that would sharply curb carbon emissions. “Carbon prices should gradually increase over time to incentivize firms and speed the shift to net zero,” she said when the report was released.

The Group of 30 is an independent global body composed of economic and financial leaders from the public and private sectors and academia. It aims to deepen understanding of global economic and financial issues.

Of course, amongst lawmakers, “tax” is a dirty word, and there are plenty of skeptics about the political prospects of a levy on carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, Yellen, in an October interview with Reuters, was “upbeat about its political chances,” Howard Gleckman wrote in a Forbes column.  “I do see Republican support, and not only Democrat support, for an approach that would involve a carbon tax with redistribution.”

One reason for optimism is Yellen herself. “Those who have known Yellen for years say that alongside her expertise, her greatest skill is her ability to build consensus,” wrote The Washington Post’s Heather Long.  On top of that, “she garnered a reputation for being the most prepared in the room.” 

But, as The Post’s Grandoni observed, Yellen wrote in a paper published last month with Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England, that “carbon prices alone are not enough.” Grandoni pointed out that, if confirmed as treasury secretary, she would also chair the Financial Stability Oversight Council. In that role, Yellen could be persuasive in getting banks and other businesses to assess and mitigate the risk that rising temperatures pose to their bottom lines.

Yet another opportunity for Yellen to help advance a broad climate agenda derives from her influence in tax policy. During the campaign, Biden promised to end subsidies for oil, gas and coal companies. Yellen would be able to reassess those tax breaks and weigh in on incentives for wind and solar power projects.

Though some in the climate action community consider Yellen’s views too moderate, environmental economist Matthew Kahn of Johns Hopkins University told E&E News’ Avery Ellfeldt that Yellen could be "more effective" on climate change than her more progressive peers. "There are ways to change our tax code to be pro-environment, and pro-economic growth, and pro-labor and pro-capital accumulation," he said, which could create a "self-fulfilling prophecy" as businesses invest in a greener economy.