The New Climate Bill Deserves to Become Law

As a steamy July drew to a conclusion, with Americans challenged not only by intense heat but by deadly floods roaring through eastern Kentucky and St. Louis and wildfires out West, some rare good news emerged from the halls of Congress. Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer (NY) and Joe Manchin (WV) announced that they had agreed to a bill that, among other things, would take major steps forward on climate change. 

It’s a tad early to pop the corks on your bottle of champagne. Any number of problems could push this compromise off the rails before it rumbles down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office. But supporters are taking heart from the determination of powerful officials to see this legislation succeed.

If passed, the bill would cut annual emissions by as much as 44 percent by the end of this decade, according to a new set of analyses from three independent research firms, Robinson Meyer reported in The Atlantic. 

I was skeptical of it when we started doing the modeling,” Anand Gopal, the executive director of strategy at Energy Innovation, told Meyer. Energy Innovation is a nonpartisan policy group in San Francisco and prepared one of the three studies. “But now I’m convinced that this is a really meaningful action by the United States on climate in this decade.” 

The Manchin-Schumer bill wouldn’t get all the way to President Biden’s 2030 goal, said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor who leads the REPEAT Project. But, he told Meyer, it would get close enough that states, cities, companies, and EPA could get the country over the finish line. At its core, the bill has one idea that would help accomplish these cuts. “​​The biggest thing is, it makes clean energy cheap. That’s really the bottom line,” Jenkins said.

Like any compromise involving a controversial issue, the bill contains provisions that trouble one side or another. As a group that believes strongly in the power of a carbon fee, we regret that the legislation does not contain one. And as The Washington Post pointed out, to secure Manchin’s vote, Democratic leadership pledged to mandate new oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska. That will only worsen the climate crisis.

However, "for every ton of emissions increases generated by [the bill's] oil and gas provisions, at least 24 tons of emissions are avoided by the other provisions," Energy Innovation concluded.

The bill “reflects a careful balancing of ambition with political pragmatism,” Stephanie Hanes wrote in The Christian Science Monitor. “It balances economic needs with environmental achievement, spends more on incentives rather than imposing penalties, and focuses on optimism as opposed to ecological doom – attributes that many analysts say make it more palatable than some past climate efforts.”

While opponents of climate action contend that it will come at a steep cost to Americans’ pocketbooks, Moody’s Analytics concluded that the bill "mitigates the economic cost of inaction." As Axios reported on those findings:

• They project that compared to a case with no additional climate policies, real GDP is 0.6% higher in 2050 and 2.7% higher by 2100.

• "The clear lesson is that upfront investments in addressing climate change reap substantial long-term economic benefits."

The Wall Street Journal told its readers that some clean-energy executives in areas like energy storage said they have already been getting more inquiries from potential customers and partners since the bill was introduced. “It is a really important signal to the market and companies like ours,” said Geoff Brown, CEO of the battery-storage company Powin LLC, which recently privately raised $135 million from investors including Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund.

If this bill becomes law, our nation will once again be a credible leader in the fight against climate change. “You can’t preach temperance from a bar stool,” Markey said in 2008, adding last week that “you can’t ask China, India, Brazil or other countries to cut emissions if we’re not doing it ourselves in a significant way.”

Environmental champion Bill McKibben is one of those who had to have winced at some of the elements of the compromise, noting in The New Yorker that the bill “reflects not just the growing strength of the climate movement but also the lingering power of the fossil-fuel industry.” But he believes that “the political trade-off is worth it.” 

“Taken as a whole,” McKibben concluded, “the bill is a triumph.” If you agree, please encourage your senators and representative to support it. Today.

Supreme Court ruling = another reason we need a carbon fee

The wreckage from the U.S. Supreme Court's June 30 decision limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions is the latest evidence that our nation needs a carbon fee.

More than 3,600 economists, including 28 Nobel laureates, have said that such a fee “offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future.”

Trying to achieve significant reductions in power plant emissions via federal regulations, while worthy, is proving exceedingly difficult. The coal industry and attorneys general from GOP-led states proved that June 30 when they derailed EPA’s efforts to do so. How many more years will it take for EPA to overcome such hurdles? We can’t wait.

“The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision maker on climate policy,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, said that the Supreme Court was insisting on a clear statement from what it knows is an “effectively dysfunctional” body. “The Court threatens to upend the national government’s ability to safeguard the public health and welfare at the very moment when the United States, and all nations, are facing our greatest environmental challenge of all: climate change,” Lazarus wrote in an email.

In response to today's ruling, Politico reported, 24 governors reaffirmed their commitments to wring carbon from the power sector. We applaud their determination, but we need strong action at the federal level.

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has led the effort on Capitol Hill to put a price on carbon. With Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and other colleagues, he is sponsoring the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act (S. 1128). It is now clearer than ever that this is the real solution to the climate change challenge..

Here Comes the Heat--and It Is Deadly

The calendar says that summer has just begun. But for many Americans, it seems that summer began a month early. On June 14, an astonishing 120 million of us were covered by extreme heat alerts.

Thanks to climate change, the past seven years have, in succession, been the seven hottest years on record. Last summer was tied for the hottest on record with the Dust Bowl year of 1936.

 This summer may be even hotter. In the first part of June, Phoenix hit 114 degrees, while Las Vegas reached 109. The list of cities that dealt with temperatures topping 100 degrees includes Austin and San Antonio (105); Lincoln (103) and North Platte, Neb. (108); Columbia, S.C. (103); and St. Louis (100).

 As global average surface temperatures increase, the probability of warm extremes, often referred to as “long tail" events, skyrockets. The average number of heat waves in the United States has tripled, from two per year in the 1960s to six in the 2010s, according to the National Climate Assessment. The heat wave season is also 45 days longer than it was in the 1960s. 

 If global warming is not slowed, the hottest heat wave many people have ever experienced will simply be their new summertime norm, Matthew Huber, a climate scientist at Purdue University, told Raymond Zhong of The New York Times. “It’s not going to be something you can escape.”

And heat kills. In fact, heat ranks as the top weather-related killer in the U.S. on average each year, killing more than 600 people annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s a number that is bound to increase. Since 2017, 570 people have died of heat-related causes in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, up from 241 heat-related deaths during the previous five years.

 “We all know that when flash flooding or thunderstorms or hurricanes are coming, we better take care of ourselves,” Erika Bandala told The Washington Post. “But not really about extreme heat. It’s probably one of the most under-considered risks that we can be facing.” Bandala is an assistant research professor of environmental science at the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas. 

Effectively, under steam-bath conditions, our bodies absorb heat from the environment faster than we can sweat to cool ourselves down. And “unfortunately for humans, we don’t pump out a lot more sweat to keep up,” Dr. W. Larry Kenney, a professor of physiology at Pennsylvania State University, explained to The New York Times’ Zhong.

 Heat’s victims often die alone, in their own homes. Apart from heatstroke, Zhong reported, it can cause cardiovascular collapse and kidney failure. It damages our organs and cells, even our DNA. Its harms are multiplied in the very old and very young, and in people with high blood pressure, asthma, and other conditions.

 When the mercury is high, we aren’t as effective at work. Our thinking and motor functions are impaired. Excessive heat is also associated with greater crime, anxiety, depression and suicide.

 Children’s education is taking a hit, as well. Many school buildings lack air conditioning and are closing more often just before and after summer vacation. Heat inhibits learning. In a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior in 2020, researchers found that students scored worse on standardized exams for every additional day of 80-degree or higher temperatures.

 On top of all that,  the combination of gusty winds, low humidity and drought — intensified by recent record-breaking temperatures — has spurred dangerous fire conditions in the West. The wildfire season has become longer in recent years and the fires, more intense.

Animals are suffering, too. Extreme heat and humidity in Kansas have killed “thousands” of cattle across the state in recent weeks, The Washington Examiner reported.. 

Of course, the U.S. is not alone. European heat waves have been creating plenty of headlines. And since the beginning of March, an unprecedented heat wave has gripped India and Pakistan, affecting more than a billion people on the subcontinent, Zoha Tunio reported in Inside Climate News.

Jacobabad, a landlocked city in Pakistan’s Sindh Province 340 miles north of Karachi, is pushing the limits of human livability on a warming planet. In the spring, Jacobabad endured temperatures in excess of 100 degrees for 51 straight days. In May, the temperature hit 123.8 degrees.

 How much more heat must we endure before Congress takes action?

Atlantic Ocean wiping out coastal homes

Imagine being the owner of a nice oceanfront home that ends up on a YouTube video as it collapses into the Atlantic. The unfortunate owner declined to speak with The Washington Post, but a neighbor whose house met the same fate in the unnamed storm, said, “It was a shock. I didn’t realize how vulnerable it was.” He had bought the coastal retreat just nine months earlier.

The two properties were in Rodanthe, North Carolina, the easternmost town in the Tar Heel State. Another home there was wiped out February 9. That had prompted Dare County and National Park Service (NPS) officials to urge other homeowners along the coast to either move or remove their homes before they met a similar fate. Officials identified 11 other homes that were in danger of collapsing. (The area is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.)

These weren’t the first homes in North Carolina to be swallowed up by the Atlantic, and they won’t be the last. Since the early 1980s, the sea level along some parts of the state has risen by roughly three inches, according to NASA.

Reacting to the latest house collapses, David Hallac, superintendent of the national seashore, told The Post, “What was surprising to me is that they lasted as long as they did. This is a rapidly eroding area … [and] I don’t have any reason to believe that erosion will stop. If anything, the scientists I’ve spoken with and publications I’ve read suggest that erosion will be exacerbated by sea level rise.”

Fortunately, no one was injured, but debris from the two homes is now scattered up and down the national seashore and will likely require an extensive cleanup process, Sarah Kuta wrote in Smithsonian.

Patricelli, a Californian who hadn’t spent a single night in the house, had teamed up with his sister to buy it for $550,000. According to a CNN story, coastal erosion in the United States costs around half a billion dollars each year in the form of deteriorated structures and land that is lost to the rising ocean.

Of course, North Carolina is not alone. Oceanographer John Englander, author of Moving to Higher Ground and a member of our Advisory Board, wrote, “At present the rate of global average sea level rise is about five millimeters a year, roughly a quarter of an inch. The rate is now triple what it was last century. And it’s accelerating. On the current path it could rise a meter higher in the next fifty years.”

The threat is abundantly clear to occupants of 337 summer cottages at Roy Carpenter’s Beach in Rhode Island. Their treasured piece of coastline is eroding faster than any other part of the state — an average of 3.3 feet a year. In 2012 the community took an indirect hit from Hurricane Sandy, which damaged 11 homes and washed three of them out to sea. 

Tony Loura, who has summered in Roy Carpenter’s Beach for almost 20 years, estimates that he used to be 1,000 feet from the water. Now, the ocean is only about 150 feet away. “Every time they say there’s a storm, I get worried,” he told The Post. “Some residents want the beach’s owners to fight off the sea. They think they should build a sea wall, they should bring in tons of sand. Last year, they spent a lot of money on sand. Guess what: It’s all gone.”

For a variety of reasons, The Post’s Brady Dennis noted, Americans continue to flock to disaster-prone areas of the country, despite growing risks of floods, fires and other catastrophes. And as sea levels rise, storms intensify and heat waves grow hotter, even places that once seemed relatively free of risk could face more serious threats to health and homes.

“It’s important for people to recognize that coastal systems are feeling the effects of sea level rise and climate change today,” said Reide Corbett, a coastal oceanographer at East Carolina University and executive director at the Coastal Studies Institute. “It’s not something that’s a decade off. It’s something that is happening.”

Businesses playing growing role in tackling climate change

Most Americans want Congress to take action on climate change. But Congress doesn't seem to be up to the job. 

Fortunately, many business leaders understand the enormity of the challenge and are taking it on. Corporate interest began to ramp up around 2010, after a House-passed greenhouse gas bill died in the Senate. 

At that point, a growing flow of reports from financial institutions warned of the economic consequences of inaction, Time magazine’s Justin Worland wrote recently. “And key voices in the business community—from Michael Bloomberg to Bill Gates—took the message on the road, telling CEOs to take climate change seriously.” 

In late 2015, a group of business leaders showed up at the Paris climate summit to talk with government officials. “The result,” Worland reported: “CEOs declared their commitment to reducing emissions, and the final text of the Paris Agreement created a formalized framework for involving private companies in the official U.N. process.”

Then Donald Trump landed in the Oval Office. The new president announced that he would take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Within hours, 20 Fortune 500 companies declared that they were “still in” the global climate deal and would cut their emissions in hopes of keeping the U.S. on track. By the time Trump left office, more than 2,300 American companies had joined the coalition.

In November 2021, when Worland walked around the Scottish Events Center at the most recent UN climate conference, “it would have been easy to forget that the conference was ostensibly for government officials. An attendee could easily spot, among the 40,000 attendees, high-profile business leaders mingling in the hallway. And by many accounts, the most significant news involved the private sector. Six major automakers joined with national governments to declare that they would produce 100% zero-emissions passenger vehicles no later than 2035. A group of financial institutions representing $130 trillion in assets committed to aligning its investments and operations with the Paris Agreement.”

Mark Carney, United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance, leads the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which represents more than $130 trillion in assets. He recently told Axios’  Andrew Freedman that his network has been focused on turning commitments into action. "Governments haven't been moving fast enough. In fact, I would argue that governments are now lagging the corporate sector and certainly lagging the NGO and activist sector in truly taking the problem as seriously as it needs to." 

The Biden administration is keenly aware of the importance of business involvement. We “need to accelerate our transition” off fossil fuels, said Brian Deese, director of the president's National Economic Council. “And that is a process that will only happen if the American private sector, including the incumbent energy producers in the United States, utilities and otherwise, are an inextricable part of that process—that’s defined our approach from the get go.”

In an April 18 letter to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 15 major businesses with operations and employees across the Great Lakes State wrote: “As major businesses, employers, and consumer brands in Michigan, we write to express our support for the transition to a carbon-neutral economy by 2050… Climate change poses a significant risk to our businesses, threatens the competitiveness and livelihoods of our supply chains, and impacts the communities in which we operate. Because of these risks to our businesses, consumers, and employees, we view climate action as a top priority for Michigan and we offer our support for statewide strategies that will achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.” 

Investors are increasingly conscious of the threat posed by climate change. BlackRock, with $10 trillion under management, is the world's largest asset manager and influences the financial sector's wider climate approach. "[W]e anticipate that by 2030, at least 75 percent of BlackRock corporate and sovereign assets managed on behalf of clients will be invested in issuers with science-based targets or equivalent," the firm said recently, compared to 25 percent today.

Business Roundtable represents the CEOs of American companies with 20 million employees and more than $9 trillion in annual revenues. “Unchecked,” the group maintains, “climate poses significant environmental, economic, public health and security threats to countries around the world, including the United States. While the United States has made significant progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a result of private sector innovation and supportive state and federal policies, the existing patchwork of federal and state regulations, tax incentives, subsidies and other policies is inefficient and has negatively impacted the long-term investment strategies of many U.S. companies by creating regulatory uncertainty.”

Of course, amidst what The Washington Post’s Douglas MacMillan called “a tsunami of environmental pledges,” there is concern about insincerity and exaggeration, or greenwashing. Claims should not always be taken at face value.

Many business leaders, like thousands of economists, have urged Congress to put an honest price on carbon emissions. Financial Times columnist Tim Harford wrote, “It has been encouraging to watch the world finally start to mobilise action on climate change — and even more encouraging to watch the rapidly falling costs of solar and wind energy. A carbon tax would help to push this clean energy revolution forward — and into the decisions each of us makes every day.” He's right.