GOP Lawmakers Seek to Roll Back Methane Fee

Policy experts say the proposal to permanently kill a fee on excessive oil and gas industry pollution will hurt U.S. LNG competitiveness and public health.

By Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News, Feb. 6, 2025

Every day in oil and gas fields, companies lose gas to leaks and other issues—product they make no money from while venting a potent climate-damaging pollutant into the atmosphere.

In November, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set a first-of-its-kind fee on those methane emissions so more companies would plug their leaks.

Now, House and Senate Republicans have introduced legislation to roll the rule back—using a mechanism that would prevent the EPA from advancing a similar rule ever again.

“It’s about as wrong-headed as it can be, on every scale,” said Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School. “The rule requires you to plug leaks and stop wasting a valuable product.”

The methane fee, or Waste Emissions Charge, was part of the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed in 2022. It applies only to large emitters of methane if their emissions exceed certain thresholds.

Facilities in compliance with Clean Air Act standards for oil and gas operations are exempt from the charge. The IRA also included $1 billion in financial and technical assistance to help oil and gas producers monitor and reduce their methane emissions. 

The fee was part of a broader set of regulations designed to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by nearly 80 percent.

EPA estimated that the methane fee alone would reduce 1.2 million metric tons of methane through 2035—the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year. Methane is the biggest driver of climate change after carbon dioxide.

But oil and gas industry groups opposed the fee. The American Petroleum Institute called it a “punitive tax” and championed the new legislation to permanently kill it.

“Americans voted for a future where U.S. energy thrives,” Amanda Eversole, API’s executive vice president and chief advocacy officer, said in a written statement.

The Congressional Review Act, which passed as part of Newt Gingrich’s 1996 Contract With America, allows Congress to overturn any regulation finalized within the last 60 working days of the previous Congress. As long as the president agrees with the decision, all it takes is a simple majority vote in the House and Senate—currently controlled by Republicans. Any future administration would then be blocked from implementing a new rule that is “substantially the same.”

That’s what the new legislation seeks to do to the methane rule.

“We are working to get our nation back on the right track, providing needed regulatory and tax relief to deliver real cost savings to American energy producers and consumers,” U.S. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who introduced the bill in the Senate, said in a written statement.

U.S. Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who introduced the bill in the House, said in a statement that he was “proud to lead this CRA to rescind this ill-conceived natural gas tax.”

The fee, according to an assessment by Energy Innovation, would create more than 70,000 jobs by encouraging investments in U.S. natural gas and would increase gross domestic product by more than $250 billion from 2023 to 2050. The group is a climate policy think tank with offices in Washington and San Francisco.

By curbing the release of harmful pollutants, the fee would also save lives and prevent asthma attacks, Parenteau said.

“What this says is Republicans don’t give a damn about protecting public health, about conserving important energy resources [and] about achieving energy independence and dominance,” Parenteau said. “If they really did, they would double down on the investments of the IRA, 80 percent of which are going to Republican districts.”

Rick Duke, who served as the U.S. deputy special envoy for climate under President Joe Biden, said rolling back the methane fee would jeopardize the competitiveness of U.S. liquified natural gas exports.  

“This is the definition of self-destructive,” Duke said. “We have a carefully negotiated set of standards, plus a backstop fee legislated by Congress that strong-foots American LNG exporters.”

The methane fee helps ensure that U.S. LNG exports will meet low methane intensity import standards on fuels that will take effect in Europe in 2030, as well as similar standards under development in Japan and South Korea, Duke said.

“This also is something which ensures, over the long haul, that American LNG has a competitive advantage relative to dirty suppliers such as Russia,” Duke said, adding that the rollback would have no impact on the price of natural gas in the U.S.

Rogelio Meixueiro, a Texas community advocate for GreenLatinos, an environmental organization, voiced concerns about the health impacts of a potential methane fee rollback. 

“Latino families, especially those living near oil and gas operations in places like East Texas and the Permian Basin, face daily exposure to toxic emissions from flares and leaks,” Meixueiro said in a statement. “This pollution increases their risk of respiratory illness, cancer, and other severe health conditions.” 

The EPA finalized the implementation rule for the methane fee on Nov. 12, well within the 60 working-day period for the Congressional Review Act. But while the CRA resolution introduced this week by Republican lawmakers can rescind that, it can’t do away with the Waste Emissions Charge mandate Congress passed in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. That law requires the EPA to implement a waste fee rule. 

That sets up an almost inevitable battle over future methane fees.

The block on any new rule that is “substantially the same” as the current one could hamstring future administrations intent on reducing methane emissions. And yet the requirement for such a rule under law could land the regulation-adverse Trump administration in court if it doesn’t come up with a replacement.

One potential way to enact a rule that isn’t substantially the same: write a more stringent one.

Fees for excessive methane emissions during the 2024 calendar year are due on Aug. 31 under the current rules.

An EPA spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the legislation “and we do not have any comment at this time.”

“I think the U.S. has really made some huge strides in reducing methane from oil and gas and would be a shame if we backslid and ceded our place on that,” said Darin Schroeder, methane legal and regulatory director for Clean Air Task Force. “There’s a lot of work to go, but I hope what we’ve accomplished as a country is not swept aside.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022025/gop-lawmakers-seek-to-roll-back-methane-fee/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_Vd0q_oStrxqi4r9Ewdy1nZLE7Pywfdxq_EZhor05ZDEJT3-9xlJkgdvpru657h9VDHqNsI6iyEkAiutlvCKD-Owp0hQ&_hsmi=346970911&utm_content=346970911&utm_source=hs_email

China Will Be Thrilled if Trump Kills America’s Green Economy

Op-ed by Jennifer Granholm, The New York Times, Jan. 23, 2025

In its heyday in the mid-20th century, the steel mill in Weirton, W.Va., employed 13,000 people and offered workers a relatively stable blue-collar life. In 2003, Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy. Shops downtown boarded up their windows, and young people moved away from the declining Appalachian town.

Weirton’s prospects were turning around in May 2023 when I made a trip there as energy secretary. Form Energy, which builds large iron-air batteries to store energy for the electric grid, had just broken ground on a 550,000-square-foot factory. Today, the production line is humming, and when the plant reaches full capacity, it will employ more than 750 people, primarily locals who were laid off from the mill.

Form Energy’s plant is one of nearly 1,000 new or expanded clean energy factories announced across the United States in the past four years, along with about 800,000 new manufacturing jobs — proof that America has begun a manufacturing renaissance.

But you can kiss that goodbye if President Trump and the new Congress roll back the laws that made it possible. Our economic competitors are lying in wait to entice companies overseas and turn our innovation into their prosperity.

The United States used to be great at building things. Around the middle of the 20th century we made half the world’s steel and half the world’s cars. By the 1970s, more Americans held manufacturing jobs than ever before.

Then, other countries started poaching our technology. They lured companies abroad with free capital and cheap labor. Back in America, policymakers stuck to their laissez-faire guns. If employers wanted to move production offshore, who were we to question the free market? But our economic competitors weren’t playing by the same rules. The free market didn’t take our jobs; China and Mexico did, by tempting companies with financial incentives.

By the time I became Michigan’s governor in 2003, many workers who had started their careers making the world’s best cars ended their careers without a pension — sometimes even training their replacements overseas before handing in their identification badges. Around 60,000 American factories shut down between 2001 and 2011.

There should be no confusion about why new factories are opening again: America is finally playing hardball with its economic competitors. As president, Joe Biden enacted three laws — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — that created tax credits, grants and loans to make it cost effective to build American products on American soil with American workers. That’s especially true of clean energy technologies like solar panels and batteries.

Form Energy received a grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help build its factory. It will also claim tax credits through the Inflation Reduction Act for producing batteries. Over the next decade, our clean energy laws could add almost $2 trillion to the U.S. economy.

Yet Mr. Trump seems poised to roll back the very incentives that are reviving American manufacturing. He has promised to kill an electric vehicle tax credit that has helped save auto factories, including in my home state. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order declaring an emergency need for more energy, which he defines almost exclusively as oil and gas. There is no mention of solar, which is generating thousands of new manufacturing jobs and was our largest new source of energy capacity last year.

This is a risky economic strategy. Other governments are waiting with bated breath for us to pare back our grants, loans and tax credits so they can use the same tools to sweet-talk the next generation of factories to their shores.

Consider electric vehicles: It’s no secret China wants to dominate the global market. Today, it accounts for more than half the world’s electric vehicle production. But over 450 electric vehicle battery companies have announced they are moving to America or expanding factories here since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — many of them leaving China to do so. It would be a national embarrassment to cede this entire industry back.

And we stand to lose more than jobs or pride. The United States’ electricity demand will grow 15 percent over the next decade because of new data centers, factories and transportation. If the Trump administration forces the loss of wind, solar and other clean energy jobs, we’ll lose access to the technologies that help make up our energy mix. Monthly utility bills will rise, and brownouts and blackouts will become regular experiences.

The administration is also deluding itself if it believes “drill, baby, drill” will create a jobs boom. The United States is already the world’s largest oil producer and gas exporter. A combination of tepid oil prices and subdued market demand has left many industry leaders wary of making major investments to increase output.

The politics of presidential transitions are delicate. Incoming administrations want to turn the page, but some policies, and some people, ought to be exempt from this tug of war. I think of the autoworkers in Michigan and the steelworkers in West Virginia — skilled women and men left asking if America still has use for their talents. It took us too long to respond, but because of these new manufacturing laws, we can finally say yes.

Securing the next generation of U.S. manufacturing jobs will require strong government and private-sector partnerships and continued investment in domestic clean energy production. When we flipped off the lights in our offices on Monday, we left the next occupants a plan for success — already in motion. It will be up to them to decide if they want to make the most of it.

Jennifer Granholm was energy secretary in the Biden administration and governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/opinion/trump-china-ev-batteries.html?searchResultPosition=1

Multiyear droughts are worsening. Here’s where they have the most effects.

More evidence shows multiyear events are increasing. One scientist said no one had characterized these protracted global droughts and their impacts — until now.

By Kasha Patel, The Washington Post, Jan. 16, 2025

More than 13,000 droughts spanning years have overwhelmed our planet across nearly four decades. These severe droughts are becoming hotter, longer and more devastating as our planet’s global temperature increases, new research has found.

Some of the worst drought effects appear in grassland areas — such as in eastern Australia as well as in the western United States, where Los Angeles is battling a spate of deadly and destructive wildfires. Additionally, researchers recently identified thousands of other multiyear droughts that may be overlooked on a global scale.

“We need awareness of these ‘new’ type of droughts, which last for more than one season or year,” said Francesca Pellicciotti, a hydrologist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and co-author of the study published Thursday. “Their effects are amplified — up to the point that some of these systems will not recover anymore.”

While there is more evidence that multiyear events are increasing, Pellicciotti said no one had characterized these long-term droughts across the globe and their impacts — until now.

The team analyzed 13,176 multiyear droughts from 1980 to 2018 through two perspectives: a meteorological standpoint, which largely looked at rainfall as well as temperature, and the ecological impact on vegetation, which helped the researchers gauge the severity.

They found that precipitation deficits in the top 100 multiyear droughts increased over the past four decades. The droughts were also getting hotter, in tandem with global average air temperatures also increasing in recent decades. The years with the largest droughts also followed El Niño events.

“Drought can propagate and reinforce themselves significantly,” said Liangzhi Chen, lead author of the study. “If a drought persists, it will persist longer.”

Still, assessing multiyear droughts and changes to them “nevertheless remains a challenge,” in part because of uncertainties in data and relatively limited information about soil moisture, said climate researcher Jason Smerdon, a professor at Columbia University who was not involved in the study.

Plus, not all droughts affect ecosystems the same way, the study found. Droughts in certain biomes — or geographic areas of certain climates, vegetation and animals — had bigger transformative effects on the land. Severe droughts in tropical rainforests were largely not as severe on vegetation as the ones that occurred in grasslands.

For example, one of the longest-lasting meteorological droughts in the study — persisting from 2010 to 2018 — covered nearly 1.5 million square kilometers in the eastern Congo basin. Another drought in the southwestern Amazon lasted nine years and covered nearly the size of the United Kingdom (213,000 square kilometers) at its peak.

Yet these droughts had relatively tame effects on their surrounding ecosystems when compared to others.

Measuring the health of vegetation using satellite data, the researchers found that droughts with the most impactful effects occurred in temperate grasslands — with hot spots in Mongolia, the western United States and eastern Australia.

In forests, Chen said, even a small change in vegetation can have significant effects. But the researchers found that the effects are greatly multiplied in grassland areas for longer-lasting dry spells. In fact, the productivity of grassland vegetation can decrease by three times as much in the second year of a drought compared with the first year.

The drought consequences are easy to spot in the western United States, which experienced some of the most severe drought by meteorological standards and effects on the surrounding ecosystem. As of Thursday, the Eaton and Palisades fires had destroyed thousands of structures and consumed more than 40,000 acres in nine days.

“When the drought gets longer, the vegetation will be drier and they are more flammable,” said Chen, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. “The whole system will be drier and soil will be drier. … It can somehow accelerate the fire to develop spatially.”

The study’s results “add to the growing consensus that we can expect larger, more frequent and more intense droughts as the planet warms,” said Matt Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA who was not involved in the study.

In a separate study, Rodell and his colleague showed a notable increase in the frequency of both major droughts and extreme wet events after 2015 — all of which have been among Earth’s top 10 warmest years on record.

Chen’s study stopped analyzing droughts after 2018, but Chen expects that the researchers would find additional intense droughts had occurred in recent years if they were to expand their dataset.

“This is an important piece of detective work that highlights how the character of droughts globally, such as their length and severity, is important to consider beyond just assessments of their occurrence,” Smerdon said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/01/16/multiyear-droughts-severe-western-grasslands-fires/

Trump Wants Greenland and the Panama Canal. It’s About Climate.

Global warming is making both places more important to global shipping and trade.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2024

To imagine the kind of future a hotter, dryer climate may bring, and the geopolitical challenges it will create, look no farther than two parts of the world that Donald Trump wants America to control: Greenland and the Panama Canal.

The president-elect in recent days has insisted that both places are critical to United States national security. He’s called to reclaim control the Panama Canal from Panama and acquire Greenland from Denmark, both sovereign territories with their own governments.

They have something else in common as well: Both are significantly affected by climate change in ways that present looming challenges to global shipping and trade.

Because of warming temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past three decades, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Massachusetts. That has huge implications for the entire world. If the ice melts completely, Greenland could cause sea levels to rise as much as 23 feet, according to NASA.

Greenland’s retreating ice could open up areas to drill for oil and gas and places to mine critical minerals, a fact that has already attracted international interest and raised concerns about environmental harms. And, ship traffic in the Arctic has surged 37 percent over the past decade, according to a recent Arctic Council report, as sea ice has declined. More melting could open up even more trade routes.

Amanda Lynch, a professor at Brown University who has studied climate change in the Arctic for nearly 30 years, said the new trade routes created by ice melt could also heighten the risk of environmental disasters. Ships from some countries, she said, are not designed to withstand Arctic conditions.

“An oil spill or some other toxic accident on that route is inevitable and could already have happened and we just don’t know it,” she said.

China has shown significant interest in a new route through the Arctic, and in November China and Russia agreed to work together to develop Arctic shipping routes.

“The traffic lanes in the Arctic are changing because of climate change,” Jose W. Fernandez, the State Department under secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, said in an interview. “It’s something that we are devoting more and more attention to, and any new administration is going to have to address going forward,” he said.

Trump calls climate change a hoax. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. But his former national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien suggested on Sunday that climate change was one factor in Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland.

“Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America, to the United States,” he told Fox News. “It’s strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.”

Which brings us to the Panama Canal.

Over 51 miles across the middle of Panama, the vital waterway uses a series of locks and reservoirs to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. The canal spares ships having to go roughly 7,000 additional miles to sail around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.

In 2023, a lengthy drought caused widespread disruption at the canal. Water levels at Gatún Lake, the principal hydrological reserve for the canal, sank to historically low levels and the authorities reduced shipping through the canal to conserve the lake’s fresh water. The resulting lines of ships waiting for weeks to cross the canal threatened to trigger a domino effect across supply chains.

Scientists found the immediate cause was El Niño, a natural weather phenomenon that can last several years. But, they found, climate change may also be prolonging dry spells and raising temperatures in the region. The canal authority has proposed a $1.6 billion project to dam the nearby Indio River to secure freshwater.

Climate change is walloping the canal from several angles, said Kevin Trenberth, the former head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Its lock system also is facing increased threats from rising sea levels, which could cause floods and erode the canal banks.

Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, said Trump’s interest in both the Panama Canal and Greenland were “kind of an indirect acknowledgment” that climate change is real and creating new global challenges.

“It’s interesting that the narrative from Trump is that if we control these places, it would be better somehow. But the challenge is the climate change component doesn’t go away,” he said.

Trump’s aspirations face some big hurdles. President José Raúl Mulino of Panama has ruled out discussing control of the canal with Trump. And the prime minister of Greenland, Mute Egede, has said control of the island, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, is “not for sale and will never be for sale.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/31/climate/trump-greenland-panama-canal-climate-change.html

Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen

Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.

By Christopher Flavelle & Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times, Dec. 18, 2024

The insurance crisis spreading across the United States arrived at Richard D. Zimmel’s door last week in the form of a letter.

Mr. Zimmel, who lives in the increasingly fire-prone hills outside Silver City, N.M., had done everything right. He trimmed the trees away from his house, and covered his yard in gravel to stop flames rushing in from the forest near his property. In case that buffer zone failed, he sheathed his house in fire-resistant stucco, and topped it with a noncombustible steel roof.

None of it mattered. His insurance company, Homesite Insurance, dumped him. “Property is located in a brushfire or wildfire area that no longer meets Homesite’s minimum standard for wildfire risk,” the letter read. (Homesite did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mr. Zimmel has company. Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.

As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.

The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.

The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group, said information about nonrenewals was “unsuitable for providing meaningful information about climate change impacts,” because the data doesn’t show why individual insurers made decisions. The group added that efforts to gather data from insurers “could have an anticompetitive effect on the market.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said the new information was crucial. In an interview, he called the new data as good an indicator as any “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.

“The climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Mr. Whitehouse said Wednesday during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”

The map of dropped policies shows how the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in nonrenewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii.

Silver City shows how the insurance crisis is a result of several factors over decades — and how hard it is to solve.

Founded as a mining town in the 1870s, the city of 10,000 nestles up against the foothills of the Gila National Forest, 3.3 million acres of alligator juniper, ponderosa pine and Gambel oak draped across softly sloping mountains.

That forest has also become a firetrap.

Since its designation as a national forest in 1924, the U.S. government sought to protect the land by stopping forest fires. That policy failed to take into account that fires clear out vegetation, according to Adam Mendonca, the U.S. Forest Service’s Washington deputy director of fire and aviation, who lives in Silver City. The result was the buildup of decades of additional trees and brush, which means wildfires, when they do happen, now burn larger and hotter.

That threat has been exacerbated by climate change, which has brought higher temperatures and drier conditions. Wildfires are now more likely to break out any time of year.

“We used to take our wildland gear home, put it into storage about September, and then bring it back to the station in February,” said Milo Lambert, Silver City’s fire chief. “Now it doesn’t leave the trucks.”

Even as the threat of wildfires has grown, home construction has pushed further into the forest. On a recent afternoon, Eric Casler, an assistant professor of natural sciences at Western New Mexico University, surveyed the neighborhoods that have grown up north of the city limits.

“See all these scattered houses out here?” Mr. Casler said. If a wildfire started to burn through the area, “it’s going to be really hard for them to stop it.”

It’s not just where people build homes that puts them at risk, experts said, but how those homes are constructed. Outside city limits, Grant County has no zoning or wildfire building restrictions, according to Roger Groves, the fire chief for the county, which includes Silver City.

Taken together, those challenges have caused insurers to pull back, according to Susan Sumrall, an insurance agent in Silver City.

Across Grant County, 51 home insurance contracts were not renewed in 2018, based on the data provided to the committee. That’s about one in 100 policies. By last year, that number had doubled to 100 nonrenewals, even as the county’s total population shrank.

One of Ms. Sumrall’s clients who has lost her insurance is Charlene Rosati. Ms. Rosati and her husband had to spend months in Houston, where he was being treated for cancer. Her insurance company, State Farm, sent an inspector to check if the home was being properly maintained, Ms. Rosati said, and concluded it was not.

Ms. Rosati’s husband died in September last year. Soon after, State Farm told her it wouldn’t renew her coverage. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Many homes in and around Silver City are mobile or manufactured homes, which can offer less protection against fires than traditional site-built houses. Lorri Williams lives in a manufactured home in a valley just outside of Silver City. She, too, got a letter from her insurer, Standard Casualty Company, based in Texas.

“Reason — unsatisfactory risk,” the company wrote in block letters. “Your home is either located inside of or in close proximity of an area that is identified as having a high risk of wildfire.”

Standard Casualty Company did not respond to a request for comment.

People who lose insurance often don’t have great options. Ms. Williams’s broker, Chelsea Hotchkiss, tried getting her another insurer, with no luck. Ms. Hotchkiss suggested the state-run high-risk insurance program, which offers coverage to homeowners who can’t find it on the private market. But that program is more expensive and provides less coverage.

After Mr. Zimmel got his nonrenewal letter last week, he called State Farm, which declined to cover him. His insurance agent struck out with three more carriers, including Travelers. (State Farm and Travelers did not respond to requests for comment.) Finally, a smaller company agreed to insure his house, but his premiums jumped by one-third.

Mr. Zimmel’s bigger worry, he said, is how the struggle over insurance could affect his home’s value, which his real estate agent estimates at about $725,000.

“I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the town if this keeps happening,” said Mr. Zimmel’s agent, Shelley Scarborough.

Officials are trying to reduce wildfire risk. The county is looking at setting building standards to cut fire exposure, Mr. Groves said. State officials are also considering ways to get more homeowners to clear the vegetation from their property, possibly through a pilot project in nearby Lincoln County that would make those steps necessary to qualify for the state high-risk insurance pool.

And the U.S. Forest Service is trying to clear out decades’ worth of thick brush and other excess vegetation — what experts call “treating” the forest. That process is anything but simple.

In the parts of the forest nearest the city, workers have cut down smaller trees, low-hanging branches and scrub oak, then stacked them into piles to dry out. After a year or so, the piles are set on fire — ideally during the winter, to reduce the risk of the fire spreading.

After those two steps, the Forest Service can perform a prescribed burn: deliberately setting fire to a patch of the forest to further clear out the vegetation. To maintain that work, the process should typically be repeated every five to 10 years.

The Forest Service has been treating between 25,000 and 30,000 of the 3.3 million acres in the Gila Forest each year, according to Mr. Mendonca. “It’s a constant struggle for the agency to try to address,” he said, citing a shortage of staffing, money and time.

The underlying challenges that are driving insurers from Silver City can be found across the country.

In parts of Wyoming, the growing risk of wildfire is similarly pushing insurers to drop customers. Teton County, which includes Jackson Hole, saw nonrenewal rates increase 1,394 percent since 2018. Jeff Rude, the state insurance commissioner, said the state was focused on educating homeowners about how to reduce the risk on their land, because tougher building standards are unpopular in Wyoming.

In California, which has some of the country’s most stringent building codes to address wildfire risk, insurers have nonetheless been fleeing. In some counties, nonrenewal rates have increased more than 500 percent since 2018. Officials announced last week that they would make it easier for insurers to raise rates, but in exchange, those insurers must agree to keep doing business in fire-prone areas.

In Hawaii, the nonrenewal rate tripled between 2018 and 2023, one of the highest increases in the country. The growing risk from wildfires and other threats has led to what Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, has called a “condo insurance crisis.” In August, he signed an emergency proclamation, setting up a task force to search for solutions.

In coastal South Carolina, which now has some of the highest nonrenewal rates in the country, insurers have been going out of business, reducing their exposure or just leaving the area, said Jay Taylor, an insurance agent in Beaufort County, which includes Hilton Head, an area particularly exposed to sea-level rise, hurricanes and other climate threats.

Homeowners complain about the difficulty and cost of getting insurance, he said. But the desire to live by the ocean, despite the danger, remains the stronger force.

“They may cuss us out,” Mr. Taylor said. “But they never stop building.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/climate/insurance-non-renewal-climate-crisis.html

Vanuatu calls on ICJ to recognize climate change’s harm

By Zack Budryk, The Hill, December 2, 2024

Representatives for the island nation of Vanuatu called on the International Court of Justice this week to recognize the harm caused by climate change, the first remarks the United Nations court heard as it considers international obligations to address climate impacts.

“The outcome of these proceedings will reverberate across generations, determining the fate of nations like mine and the future of our planet,” Ralph Regenvanu, the country’s special envoy for climate change and the environment, said in remarks Monday at The Hague. “Today, we find ourselves on the frontlines of a crisis we did not create, a crisis that threatens our very existence.”

Conversely, he said, the majority of planet-warming emissions come from “a handful of readily identifiable states” that will not suffer immediate consequences to the same degree as poorer and island nations.

Over the next two weeks, the 15-member court is set to hear arguments from representatives of nearly 100 countries, including China and the U.S., the two biggest national emitters, before issuing an opinion on states’ obligations regarding climate change. The court’s opinions are not legally binding, and neither China nor the U.S. fully acknowledges its authority. But if the court sides with Vanuatu and its allies, it could provide a major precedent for climate change-related lawsuits.

A group of law students in Oceanian nations worked in collaboration with Vanuatu for years to secure the ICJ hearing, and the United Nations General Assembly called on the court to issue an opinion on the matter in a unanimous vote in March.

Vanuatu, home to about 335,000 people, is an archipelago of 82 islands, many of which are as little as 3 feet above sea level, and has seen sea level increase by about 0.2 inches in the past 30 years, as well as an increase in extreme weather like tropical cyclones, flooding and landslides.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5017658-vanuatu-climate-change-lawsuit-icj/