A dozen predictions for 2023

In the fight against climate change, 2023 will be a year unlike any other. No, the problem won’t be solved, but the range and seriousness of efforts to meet this severe challenge will enable us to make significant progress.

No one can know the future, even in the short term. That is especially true in a realm where so much is in flux–and with a European war creating unforeseen problems. Grist quizzed a wide range of experts about what lies ahead, and we are offering a dozen predictions for 2023:

A carbon border adjustment will gain momentum. European Union governments have reached a deal on the world’s first major carbon border tax, as part of an overhaul of the bloc’s flagship carbon market that aims to make its economy carbon-neutral by 2050, CNN reported. The measure will apply first to iron and steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity production and hydrogen before being extended to other goods. How will the U.S. respond? Will Congress follow the lead of senators such as Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Mitt Romney (R-UT) and enact a carbon fee? That would make a lot of sense.

EV sales will surge–but there are obstacles that will limit that surge. The percentage of U.S. drivers who said they plan to purchase EVs is up three percentage points compared to the same point last year, a Deloitte survey found, with intent to purchase traditional ICE-powered vehicles dropping by six percentage points. Cox Automotive projects that 1 million EVs will be sold in the U.S. in 2023. Tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are helping boost demand. Obstacles to faster growth include a low supply of raw materials to make the batteries and driver skittishness about whether there will be enough charging stations.

“The real effects where these tax credits will have a big impact will be in the 2026-to-2032 period — a few years into the future — as automakers gear up and volumes increase,” said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst for Consumer Reports magazine, told PBS.

Backers of mass transit will try to obtain a larger share of the federal funding. They maintain that U.S. car culture is a resource-intensive vision of the future, according to Politico’s Alex Daugherty. “It’s so blatant that you get tax credits for buying an electric vehicle but there’s zero dollars for buying an electric bike, zero dollars for riding public transit,” said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute. “It is subsidizing car ownership more than any other mode of transportation by far.”

The trend toward electrifying American homes will ramp up sharply. Sam Calisch, head of special projects at Rewiring America, told Grist that the IRA “will provide the average American household an ‘electric bank account’ of $10,600 in incentives to electrify. This includes a first-of-its-kind electrification-rebate program with $4.5 billion to help low- and moderate-income households purchase heat pumps, induction stoves, and other electric appliances.” 

Geothermal energy will lose its low profile and attract growing interest. One of the oldest forms of clean power is ready for a comeback, Politico reported. The technology that harnesses the heat beneath the Earth’s crust is drawing fresh interest from the oil drilling sector after lawmakers boosted funding flows.

Winners of November’s state and local elections will embrace efforts to counter climate change. For example, some states will move toward cap-and-trade systems like Washington’s, where the first auction of credits is scheduled for February 28. The system makes companies pay for their emissions by buying tradable permits dubbed Washington Carbon Allowances. The pool of credits will shrink every year, encouraging companies to go green. The market is much like California’s, where the price is just over $30 a ton.

Resilience will become increasingly important as we battle climate change. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is job one, but it’s increasingly clear that progress has been too slow, so building resilience is critical, and efforts will gain momentum. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, representative-elect for Florida’s 10th District and the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress, said, “Resiliency and infrastructure are top priorities for me. In my district in Central Florida, flooding is our biggest problem. We have to make sure that homes are more resilient to flooding and manage the flow of water. These hurricanes are becoming stronger and lasting longer. The cost of not doing anything is far greater than the cost of making bold moves right Dr now.”

IRA money will generate extraordinary investment by the private sector. “The price signal is just huge,” said PJ Deschenes, a managing director at investment bank Nomura Holdings Inc. But GOP will try to throw sand in the gears of the IRA. “It’s Solyndra on steroids,” the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s likely chairwoman, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), said in September of the $250 billion included in the new climate law for the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program.

Carbon capture will gain support. With the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) having concluded that the world cannot hit climate change targets without this technology, the race to scale it up will intensify. The IRA contains significant incentives. Today, there are 27 carbon-capture projects operational worldwide and 14 in the U.S., according to an October report from the Global CCS Institute. Another 108 are in development worldwide in various stages of production.

More Americans will realize the financial and health costs of climate change and will want action by governments and corporations. Over the past four decades, the United States has experienced an average of 7.7 billion-dollar disasters annually. But since 2017, the average has jumped to nearly 18 each year. So more of us are aware of the threats. Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that they are concerned that global climate change will harm them personally, according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center.

Wind and solar developers will devise elaborate plans to provide round-the-clock renewable power. Since two of the main renewable energy sources generate electricity only when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, project developers, utilities, and grid operators are trying a mix of options to overcome that challenge, including building huge amounts of renewable capacity, storing excess power on batteries, and using algorithms to make project economics work.

Federal courts could slow the transition to clean energy. Energy Wire’s Niina H. Farah wrote, “From pipeline permitting to agency rulemaking, federal courts are poised to decide a suite of legal challenges in 2023 that could set the pace of the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels. The rulings could also tee up a clash between Congress and the courts.”

Are you interested in making a profit from all this activity? On Jan. 2, Goldman Sachs chief risk officer Brian Lee listed the investment bank’s “top 20 buy-rated stock ideas,” based on “quantifiable” benefits from IRA spending.

Climate Change Is Increasingly a Factor When Americans Move. And Yet.....

Are Americans moving to places where climate change poses less of a risk? Some are. They don’t want to worry that rising sea levels are going to wash away their coastal home or that a wildfire will roar into their wooded western valley. Or they want to avoid triple-digit temperatures or water rationing.

“Millions and likely tens of millions of Americans” will move because of climate through the end of the century, Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate at the Tulane University School of Architecture, told Yahoo News. “People move because of school districts, affordability, job opportunities. There are a lot of drivers, and I think it’s probably best to think about this as ‘climate is now one of those drivers.’”

Yet a surprising number of us are still heading to areas that face above-average threats. Census projections suggest the Southeast will see the nation’s largest population gains over the next two decades, despite the climate change-related risks that the region faces.

Joseph Von Nessen, a University of South Carolina economist, said that most of Southeast’s new residents are coming from New England. Many are retirees attracted by the region’s lower cost of living, mild winters and other charms. Younger workers are moving to the region as well, drawn by newly-created manufacturing jobs.

 The population of Charleston, S.C., grew 25 percent from 2010 to 2020. The city has approved plans for a 9,000-acre residential and commercial development that, environmental advocates say, would locate about half of its homes in a flood plain, Anna Phillips wrote in The Washington Post. From 1970 to 2020, Florida’s Cape Coral-Fort Myers area grew an astounding 623 percent, to more than 760,000 people.

 Can the insurance industry convince homeowners to choose wisely? “I’m very concerned,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas told The Associated Press, “that these natural disasters are either going to raise premiums or we’re going to be in a deeper crisis like Florida, where insurance providers don’t want to come to New Mexico because it’s a very challenging market to insure.” 

Some climate advocates fear that despite the hazards, newcomers to the Southeast may not be aware of the risks they’ll face. Realtors aren’t required to disclose the flood history of the properties they sell, and finding that information can be difficult, The Post’s Phillips reported. 

 “If every Realtor was required to tell people, ‘You should know over the period of your mortgage your home will flood at least once, maybe twice,’ I think people would go, 'Whoa, what?” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But due to policy failures in state capitals and in Washington, we have made it extremely difficult for people to not only find that information but to even tell people about it.”

 The reality, sketched out in a report by the nonprofit research group Climate Central, is that hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida are in danger of being lost or severely damaged because of rising sea levels.

According to PBS, the report says that, in just 30 years, more than four million acres of land will be increasingly threatened by routine flooding. By 2100, over $100 billion worth of property could be in jeopardy as the coastlines of the U.S. continue to creep inland.

The most aggressive effort to persuade Americans to leave hurricane-threatened areas, The New York Times reported, may be a new program that prices federal flood insurance according to climate risk, dramatically increasing costs for people living in vulnerable places.

Another approach, now being tried by the Biden administration, will give three Native tribes $25 million each to move away from coastal areas or rivers. The three communities — two in Alaska, and one in Washington State — will move their key buildings onto higher ground and away from rising waters, with the expectation that homes will follow. The spending, The New York Times’ Christopher Flavelle explained, is meant to create a blueprint for the federal government to help other communities move away from vulnerable areas.

Help also may be coming from Congress. A bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) would strengthen federal investments in coastal restoration and resilience efforts by sending revenue generated from offshore wind back to coastal states and amending the revenue sharing program under the 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. It was approved in July by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Known as the RISEE Act, S. 2130 has 20 cosponsors. It will need to be reintroduced in January. Please urge your senators to support it and encourage your House representative to cosponsor the House version (H.R. 9049).

Could Putin's war speed global decarbonization?

No one should be writing a thank you card to President Putin, but his invasion of Ukraine may end up accelerating the world’s transition to clean energy. That was the message from three international energy experts recently.

While some countries have been burning more fossil fuels such as coal in response to natural gas shortages caused by the war, wrote The New York Times’ Brad Plumer, “that effect is expected to be short-lived, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual World Energy Outlook, a 524-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050… The agency now predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.”

"Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

"The energy world is shifting dramatically before our eyes. Government responses around the world promise to make this a historic and definitive turning point towards a cleaner, more affordable and more secure energy system."

As Plumer explained, “Many countries have responded to soaring prices for fossil fuels this year by embracing wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. In the United States, Congress approved more than $370 billion in spending for such technologies under the recent Inflation Reduction Act.” 

Global clean energy investment is set to rise to more than $2 trillion a year by 2030, up by half from current levels, while "international energy markets undergo a profound reorientation in the 2020s as countries adjust to the rupture of Russia-Europe (energy) flows, the IEA said.

Global emissions of fossil fuels leading to climate change will peak by 2025, as coal use falls within the next several years, natural gas demand plateaus by 2030, and oil demand levels off in the middle of the next decade before falling.

"One of the effects of Russia’s actions is that the era of rapid growth in natural gas demand draws to a close," the IEA said, pointing to a rise in global demand for gas of less than five percent between last year and 2030.

Director-General Francesco La Camera of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) agrees with Birol. “In the mid- and long term, the Ukraine crisis will bring an acceleration to the energy transition because governments finally realize that going for renewables is not only good for the environment, jobs, GDP, but also good for ensuring higher energy independency," he said.

The head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is singing from the same hymnal. "It's clear that this war in Ukraine will speed up our consumption of fossil energy and it's (also) speeding up this green transition," said Petteri Taalas, WMO’s secretary-general. "From a climate perspective, the war in Ukraine may be seen as a blessing," 

There are skeptics, though. At COP27, the research collaboration Climate Action Tracker asserted that nations scrambling this year to buy more natural gas to replace supplies from Russia are risking years of emissions that could thwart climate goals.

In any event, it behooves all countries and companies to press ahead with efforts to speed the transition from fossil fuels. That includes putting an honest price on carbon.

Offshore wind projects gaining momentum

The federal government is moving quickly to develop offshore wind farms along all three U.S. coasts. The Biden administration has set a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The latest news is a proposal for floating offshore wind projects along the Pacific Coast since California’s ocean waters are too deep for the fixed-bottom wind turbines that have been deployed off the Atlantic coast. 

The Interior Department plans to hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on December 6 for areas off central and Northern California. This will be the first offshore wind lease sale on the West Coast. The sale will include five lease areas totalling 373,268 acres. The large-scale projects that would be developed could one day generate more than 4.5 gigawatts of energy and power 1.5 million homes, the department said. By 2035, Interior aims to have 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind capacity. 

The announcement, reported Nichola Groom of Reuters, “is the latest in a government push to put wind turbines along U.S. coastlines, creating a new domestic jobs engine.”

Jobs are also top of mind along the Gulf Coast, where the Biden administration is planning to conduct additional lease sales. Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group that represents both the offshore oil and wind industries, said, “Steel fabricators, heavy lift vessel operators, marine construction firms, subsea engineers, seismic surveyors, and a host of other jobs and businesses that are integral to Gulf of Mexico oil and gas development are also building out American offshore wind,” Milito said in an email to The Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow. “There is a reason the first U.S.-built offshore wind substation is being constructed in Ingleside, Texas.”

Most of the offshore wind activity has been in New England and farther down the Atlantic Coast. New York State now has five offshore wind 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 nation-leading offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the other states moving forward to take advantage of their offshore winds.

President Biden has directed the Interior Department to pursue wind development off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, rescinding an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in 2020. Trump’s order banned all offshore energy development, including oil- and wind-power lease sales, in the southeast Atlantic.

Of course, there will be challenges in moving all these projects from the drawing boards. Some opponents of offshore turbines have asserted that they mar ocean scenery. That may not be an issue with the California proposals since the floating turbines would likely be more than 20 miles offshore. But, as The Wall Street Journal’s Katy Stech Ferek pointed out, “there are potential conflicts with the commercial fishing boats, the shipping industry, marine researchers, tourists and the U.S. military. Those include everything from worries about sea turtles and other marine life to obstacles such as shipping routes and underwater telecommunication cables.”

The nation’s first offshore wind project, off Block Island along the Rhode Island coast, started generating electricity in late 2016. With a boost from the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, the United States is now on the verge of a giant leap forward. That appears to be true internationally, as well. Offshore wind will account for 25 percent of global renewables investments in 2030, up from six percent in 2020, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates.  

Human Health Continues to Suffer due to Climate Change

Tackling climate change is important for the health of the planet, right? Absolutely. But too few Americans make the connection between climate change and human health–and the financial toll of those health problems. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”

Axios reported that the world faces “a climate change-fueled health crisis — from increased emergency department visits due to heatstroke, exacerbated asthma and even heart attacks to injuries and illness linked to severe storms,” such as Hurricane Ian.

Let’s start with extreme heat. You may recall that in the summer of 2021 Seattle hit 108 degrees, some 30 degrees above normal. About 600 additional people died over a week in Oregon and Washington. Writing in Time magazine, Dr. Sameed Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania reported that two recent studies of the contiguous U.S. found that from 2008 to 2017, between 13,000 and 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat.  

Climate change, Axios reported, has also been linked to increased risks for kidney disease, obesity and diabetes, injuries, the transmission of infectious diseases, some cancers and poorer mental health. “We are learning more and more that the combustion of fossil fuels is contributing to a massive epidemic of chronic disease around the world that dwarfs AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined,” said Gary Cohen, president and founder of Health Care Without Harm, a group that focuses on reducing health care's carbon footprint.

Wildfire is another growing threat related to climate change, especially in the West. Those fires kill a number of people, including firefighters, and they destroy homes and other buildings. But they also pollute the air. Researchers found a 27-fold increase over the past decade in the number of people experiencing an “extreme smoke day,” which is defined as air quality deemed unhealthy for all age groups. In 2020 alone, nearly 25 million people across the contiguous United States were affected by dangerous smoke, Mira Rojanasakul reported in The New York Times.

“We have been remarkably successful in cleaning up other sources of air pollution across the country, mainly due to regulation like the Clean Air Act,” said Marshall Burke, a co-author of the research and professor of earth system science at Stanford. “That success, especially in the West, has really stagnated. And in recent years this started to reverse.” 

The research, Rojanasakul wrote, indicates that wildfire smoke could be a leading cause of that reversal, wiping out most of the progress. Particulate pollution causes more than short-term irritation. It has been linked to chronic heart and lung conditions, as well to cognitive decline, depression and premature birth. 

Then there’s infectious disease. More than half of the infectious diseases known to affect humans are being aggravated by climate change, scientists reported recently in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. The research found that illnesses like hepatitis, cholera, malaria, and hundreds of others were spreading faster, expanding in range, and becoming more severe because of climate-related events.

It’s not just transmission that’s increasing; climate change is also making it harder to fight off these diseases by reducing people’s health, immunity, and access to medical care, the researchers concluded. 

“The environment harbors dozens of other carriers of illnesses you’ve probably never heard of,” Zoya Teirstein wrote in Grist. They come from bugs, shellfish, and even soil. With global temperatures rising, well-known vector-borne illnesses are becoming more common, and other, lesser-known diseases are spreading into new areas.

These illnesses will “continue to tax our public health and medical care systems for years to come,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites they spread can cause joint pain, skin lesions, long-term memory problems — even death. 

Then there’s hunger. The number of people experiencing extreme hunger has more than doubled in some of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, Oxfam International said in a new report. Some 48 million people are now suffering from acute hunger, and nearly 18 million of those people are on the brink of starvation. Conflict remains the primary driver of hunger, but “the onslaught of climate disasters is now outpacing poor people’s ability to cope, pushing them deeper into severe hunger,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

The report found a strong correlation between extreme weather and rising hunger in 10 climate hot spots, wrote Karina Tsui in The Washington Post. “Climate change is no longer a ticking bomb,” said Bucher. “It is exploding before our eyes.”.

These soaring costs are not included in the prices of fossil fuels. They are what economists call “external costs.” We believe that fossil fuel prices should include such costs. If Congress opted for an honest price by enacting a carbon fee, there would be stronger incentives to speed the transition to clean energy.