Billions in Climate Deal Funding Could Help Protect U.S. Coastal Cities

Communities across the country hope to tap into funds from Democrats’ new climate law to restore coastal habitats, part of a program that emphasizes nature-based solutions.

By Stephanie Lai, The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2022

NEWPORT BAY, Calif. — Claire Arre, a marine biologist, waded through the sand in search of an Olympia oyster on a recent sunny afternoon, monitoring the bed her organization had built to clean up the surrounding watershed and contemplating all that could be done if she could get her hands on federal funding to expand the work.

Ms. Arre’s project aims to combat climate change using nature instead of human-engineered construction, and it is one of many across the nation’s 254 coastal counties that is eligible for billions in federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the sprawling climate, health care and tax bill signed last month by President Biden.

The measure could “have a direct result in getting our next restoration project off the ground and sharing the beneficial impacts here into another area,” said Ms. Arre, the director of marine restoration for Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit group, as she meticulously scanned the site, surrounded by sandbars and cliffs, pickleweed and docked boats.

The group hopes to expand to nearby Huntington Harbour, and it has been seeking funding to do so.

A little-noticed section of Democrats’ climate legislation, which made the largest federal investment in history to combat the warming of the planet, injects $2.6 billion over five years into coastal communities across the country through grants to fund projects that prepare and respond to hazardous climate-related events and disturbances. The program makes up less than 1 percent of the total climate investment in the law, but it is widely regarded as a significant step and the latest sign of a shift by the federal government toward funding nature-based climate solutions.

Officials from coast to coast have long sought funding to restore natural habitats that are essential to beach communities, as floods wreak havoc in the East and rising sea levels increasingly threaten the West. By 2050, sea levels are expected to rise by a foot or more on average, increasing as much in that time as they have in the past century.

Scientists expect the impact of climate change to be far more damaging in the future. Rising sea levels have been exacerbated by flooding and cataclysmic rainstorms, called “megastorms,” that could upend San Francisco and cities across the globe. Along the East Coast, sea-level rise and flooding from rainfall have been threatening cities in Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, among others. Cities are facing a number of obstacles like repairing destroyed roads and drains or retreating inland. And paying for such measures presents yet another challenge.

“Our coastal areas are shrinking before our very eyes, and people are being displaced,” said Representative Troy Carter, Democrat of Louisiana, whose home state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coast — roughly the size of Delaware — since the 1930s. The coastal restoration funding “is a grand-slam home run,” he said.

Escalating climate threats have prompted a continuing debate among policymakers and experts about how best to guard against devastating damage, between those who prioritize building man-made infrastructure like sea walls — sometimes called “gray infrastructure” — and those who favor nature-based solutions, or so-called green infrastructure.

Some scientists and climate organizations see the climate law as a clear signal that the government is giving priority to natural solutions.

“You are seeing a lot more attention and acceptance of greener options,” said Charles Lester, the director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s a spectrum of ways of responding to shoreline change, and this funding is causing us to think more completely and more holistically about all the different pieces of these puzzles.”

Tom Cors, a government relations official at the Nature Conservancy, said the resilience funding in the climate law, in combination with resources in the infrastructure law passed last year, represented the most significant influx of money for green infrastructure, the latest move in a shift that began about a decade ago.

The bipartisan infrastructure measure added $3 billion to the federal pot for projects related to habitat restoration and climate resilience, but funding has yet to be disbursed as the application process is still underway, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Nearly half of it is earmarked for “high-impact natural infrastructure projects.”

And in 2020, Mr. Biden signed legislation that mandated that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the main civil engineering agency of the government that has historically favored gray infrastructure, consider nature-based solutions during an early planning stage of some projects.

The funding from the new climate law will be distributed to NOAA, which is expected to provide funding through contracts, grants and other agreements to local, state and tribal governments, nonprofits and institutions of higher education. The law specified that the money should go to projects that support natural resources in coastal and marine communities, including wetland restoration or restoring sea grass and oyster beds. It also said the funding should be used to protect fisheries and for projects that protect communities from extreme storms and climate change.

Some examples include adding sand or restoring dunes to provide a buffer for the receding shoreline. Wetland restoration also helps absorb storm waters and carbon dioxide — a chemical in the atmosphere known for warming the planet — and contribute to biodiversity. The flow of water can also be slowed by restoring sea grass and oyster beds.

Amy Hutzel, the executive officer for California’s State Coastal Conservancy, the state’s leading nature-based restoration agency, said she was pleased that the climate law focused on nature-based projects, which can reduce the impact of wind and wave patterns along the coast, as opposed to building levees and sea walls.

The moment a city constructs a levee or a sea wall, it “is immediately deteriorating,” Ms. Hutzel said. “When you work with nature, you are building a system that the natural processes are maintaining.”

Some scientists argue that such an approach can be more cost-effective than man-made projects. A New York City study in Queens showed that using gray infrastructure would be twice as expensive as incorporating both gray and green projects.

But nature-based solutions, while attractive, can be difficult to execute, Mr. Lester noted.

Jennifer Brunton, the New York district water business line leader at WSP, an engineering consulting firm, said many of her clients turn away from green infrastructure because they do not have enough space for nature-based solutions and because it is less mainstream.

“They’re hallmark projects,” Ms. Brunton said. “Gray infrastructure is tried and true.”

Gray infrastructure has traditionally been preferred by homeowners along the coast who are willing to part with their beach access if it means creating concrete fixtures that can safeguard their homes, as well as city officials who are skeptical about the effectiveness of green infrastructure. Proponents of gray infrastructure also argue that green projects need constant maintenance, whereas gray infrastructure can be easier to maintain.

In Pacifica, Calif., homeowners like Mark Stechbart, a retiree, have been calling for more gray infrastructure to offset the sea-level rise that is threatening their properties. The coastline in his Northern California community does not have the right conditions for green infrastructure, Mr. Stechbart said, leaving the city with two options: go gray or go inland.

“Gray infrastructure, at least around here, is the only thing that works,” Mr. Stechbart said in an interview. “Either we have a town that functions or we don’t.”

He added, “There are some areas where if you don’t maintain and improve shoreline protections, a major hotel goes in the water.”

Lawmakers in both parties have embraced nature-based infrastructure initiatives, though Republicans opposed the climate law en masse.

“Investing in natural infrastructure projects will better protect coastal communities while restoring habitat and stimulating local economic development,” Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, said in a statement.

Representative Michelle Steel, Republican of California, has supported nature-based resiliency projects in her district, such as adding sand to Huntington Beach. In a statement explaining why she voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, Ms. Steel said, “We need to cut federal spending and get costs under control instead of expecting American families to foot the bill for Washington’s spending addiction.”

Representative Garret Graves, Republican of Louisiana, a champion of resilience projects, also voted no. In a written statement, he said he had little confidence that NOAA would be “fair or transparent” when allocating the funding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/us/politics/climate-law-coastal-projects.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Rising seas could swallow millions of U.S. acres within decades

New research finds an estimated 25,000 properties in Louisiana could slip below tidal boundary lines by 2050. Florida, Texas and North Carolina also face profound economic risks.

By Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2022

The water is coming.

There’s no longer much doubt about that, as scientists have increasingly documented how the warming of the planet has accelerated sea level rise along coasts around the world.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

But an analysis published Thursday by the research nonprofit Climate Central reveals a troubling dimension of the economic toll that could unfold in the United States, as hundreds of thousands of homes, offices and other privately owned properties slip below swelling tide lines over the next few decades.

Here are five takeaways from the research about the people and places that stand to lose most, the likely ripple effects and reasons the world must cut its emissions of greenhouse gases in order to eventually stem the rising waters:

1. Sea level rise will shift coastlines — and property lines

Researchers at Climate Central took scientific data on projected sea level rise, as well as information about state tidal boundaries, and combined that with records on more than 50 million individual properties across hundreds of U.S. counties to identify parcels most likely at risk.

Their conclusion: Nearly 650,000 individual, privately owned parcels, across as many as 4.4 million acres of land, are projected to fall below changing tidal boundaries by 2050. The land affected could swell to 9.1 million acres by 2100. According to Thursday’s analysis, properties with a collective assessed value of $108 billion could be affected by the end of the century, based on current emissions. But, the authors noted, because complete property values were not available for all counties, the actual total is likely to be far higher.

The changes also could come gradually at first, then quickly. In many communities, the authors wrote, structures are clustered in areas that historically are on safe ground. But once rising seas reach those densely developed elevations, “the number of affected buildings sharply increases.”

“As the sea is rising, tide lines are moving up elevation, upslope and inland,” said Don Bain, a senior adviser at Climate Central and an expert in sea level rise, who led the analysis. “People really haven’t internalized that yet — that ‘Hey, I’m going to have something taken away from me by the sea.’ ”

2. The Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast stand to lose most

It’s no surprise that Louisiana, where the seas are swelling and land is sinking, faces a daunting loss of property in the years to come.

The Climate Central analysis estimated that more than 25,000 properties, totaling nearly 2.5 million acres in the state, could fall wholly below tidal boundary lines by 2050 — a number that far exceeds any other place in the nation. That would amount to 8.7 percent of Louisiana’s total land area, the report found.

But other states also appear to face widespread threats. The top three at risk behind Louisiana are Florida, North Carolina and Texas, all of which have large swaths of low-lying, imperiled coastlines.

While property across the Southeast might face the most collective risk, other states also have reason for concern. New Jersey and New York, for instance, also stand to see thousands of properties fall below tidelines in coming decades. Same for Maryland, which the researchers project could see more than 2,500 buildings impacted.

The impacts of sea level rise already are evident, as some communities face the prospect of retreat and a growing number grapple with nuisance or “sunny day” flooding.

Eventually, such issues will “transition from something that’s rare to becoming something that’s normal,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer and sea level rise expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service.

3. It’s not just about flooded homes. It’s about eroding tax bases.

The loss of homes and other properties — especially those along the waterfront — isn’t just a tragedy for owners. It is a surefire way to erode the revenue municipal governments need to operate.

“Ultimately, this is a local problem and a local story,” Bain said. “We finance local government through our property taxes.”

If sea levels continue to rise unabated, that poses more than just a problem to beaches and condos that line the coasts. It eventually will translate into fewer taxable properties, and less money to fund schools and fire departments, fix roads, maintain sewers and provide other essential services.

“Diminished property values and a smaller tax base can lead to lower tax revenues and reduced public services — a potential downward spiral of disinvestment and population decline, reduced tax base and public services, and so on,” Thursday’s analysis found.

4. The potential ripple effects are vast

Eroding tax bases are a big problem. But hardly the only one. The study also found a litany of other complications that likely will result as sea levels inch higher and higher.

“The legal and political ramifications of these changes are complex, and will likely vary among locations,” the analysis found. “Those ramifications extend well beyond loss of tax revenue as property owners object to paying taxes on submerged land.”

The rise in America's billion-dollar climate disasters

Beyond those initial shocks, municipalities and individuals will also be forced to confront the significant costs for removing inundated structures and flooded septic tanks. Governments could be on the hook for properties that get abandoned, adding additional expenses not covered by their budgets.

But even before then, communities already are wrestling with the need to repair streets and roads damaged by flooding, as well as overwhelmed or outdated sewer and water systems. “How city and county management teams respond to these risks, or if they respond at all, is material to the city’s and county’s future ability to repay debt and protect its credit rating,” the authors wrote.

5. The future is not (entirely) set in stone

The world’s foremost scientists have found that given the carbon built up in the atmosphere after generations of burning fossil fuels, the rate of sea level rise is increasing and will continue over the next several decades.

Those findings are in line with a major report earlier this year from the NOAA, which found that sea levels could rise along U.S. coastlines by roughly a foot between now and 2050 — roughly as much change over the next three decades as over the past century.

“That trajectory appears somewhat set,” said Sweet, who was not involved in Thursday’s study.

What remains undetermined is how communities across the United States prepare for the changes they know are coming, and what this country and others do to slow the heating of the planet.

“If we get our act together, we can get to a lower curve, and that buys us time,” Bain said. “We don’t want [seas] rising so fast that it outpaces our capacity to adapt.”

Sweet said having access to reliable data hopefully gives public officials and individuals information they need “so they can make the smart choices to best defend and prepare against rising seas” — from shoring up infrastructure to making thoughtful decisions about development.

But ultimately, he said, the world must act in concert to make sure the problem doesn’t grow worse indefinitely.

“Emissions matter, especially as we get beyond the next 20 or 30 years,” Sweet said. “You reduce emissions, you reduce your likelihood of higher sea levels.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/08/sea-level-rise-climate-central/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=wp_energy_and_environment&wpisrc=nl_green

Costs of climate change far surpass government estimates, study says

The new comprehensive analysis pegs the social cost of carbon at $185 a ton — more than triple the current federal standard

By Dino Grandoni & Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2022

The economic toll of deadly heat waves, crop-killing droughts and rising seas that each additional ton of carbon dioxide levies on society is much higher than the U.S. government tallies when considering new regulations, according to a new analysis published Thursday.

A sobering paper in the journal Nature on the damage caused by climate change brings into relief the threat that higher temperatures pose on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people at home and overseas.

The research team’s key finding: Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that cars, power plants and other sources add to the atmosphere costs society $185 — more than triple the federal government’s current figure.

The new study calculating climate change’s economic toll — known as the “social cost of carbon” — could renew pressure on President Biden to hike the federal government’s own estimate, a crucial number used by officials when assessing the potential costs and benefits of government regulations.

“The bottom line is that our results show that when you fully update the social cost of carbon methodology to the state of the science, it suggests that the existing estimates that are in use by the federal government are vastly underestimating the harm,” said Kevin Rennert, a research fellow at the think tank Resources for the Future and a co-author of the paper.

Here’s more about what it all means:

The social what of what?

With wildfires burning more ferociously, droughts lasting longer and hurricanes becoming more intense, scientists agree the monetary toll of climate change will be enormous. The social cost of carbon is an attempt to put a dollar figure on that destruction.

The idea for the metric came to fruition during President Barack Obama’s administration, which at one point settled on a cost of roughly $51 a ton when adjusted for inflation. With nations releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, the toll adds up pretty quickly.

But many experts thought the Obama-era figure might be lowballing the actual costs. In early 2017, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommended a major update to the metric to make the calculation more transparent and scientifically sound.

Donald Trump became president a week after the release of the NAS report, and his administration wasted little time in disbanding the interagency working group on the carbon price. By excluding damages of climate change abroad, the Trump team slashed the estimated cost of each ton of carbon pollution to between $1 and $7 per ton.

After Joe Biden took office, the White House reestablished the working group and told federal agencies to return to using the Obama-era price of $51 per ton — at least temporarily, promising to update the cost. In May, the Supreme Court allowed Biden’s deputies to continue using that higher interim estimate.

What are some of the big costs of climate change?

Temperature-related mortality extracts a particularly high cost, according to the research group led by experts at Resources for the Future and the University of California at Berkeley.

In the United States, extreme heat is the most fatal form of weather disaster, with hundreds of Americans losing their lives last summer. Any additional hospitalization or death as temperatures rise is, of course, a tragedy — but it’s also one to which economists are able to assign a dollar value.

Another major concern is crop failure. Altered yields of rice, soy, maize and wheat as weather patterns shift could upend global trade and have a far worse economic impact than previously thought, according to the team.

In Thursday’s analysis, researchers also lowered the “discount rate” — a method of measuring future costs and benefits — on the dangers of sea level rise and other effects of climate change. A lower discount rate implies a higher cost to inaction.

Whatever number policymakers use, the idea is to provide them a metric by which to tally the ongoing costs and benefits of a regulation or infrastructure project years or decades into the future. Ideally, the calculations offer a worthwhile road map of whether implementing certain policies will pay off down the road.

To make the dizzying set of calculations behind Thursday’s paper, the researchers gathered specialists — including climate scientists, economists and statisticians — from a dozen institutions to assess the latest science.

“When we started this project, we knew that we would only succeed by assembling a team of leading researchers in each discipline to contribute their expertise,” said David Anthoff, an environmental economist at UC-Berkeley and another study co-author.

The team emphasized there is still a wide range of uncertainty in their estimate. And there are plenty of negative impacts they did not assess, including the potential decline of ecosystems, loss of labor productivity and outbreak of war.

Is the social cost of carbon controversial?

You betcha.

For well over a decade, many elected officials and academics have debated how to properly quantify the economic costs of greenhouse gas emissions — and how much the government should rely on such estimates.

On one end of the spectrum are folks who reject the utility of such an approach altogether. When President Biden boosted the figure to $51, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called the move “a backdoor carbon tax.”

“Since the president can’t rationalize the crippling costs of his climate policies,” Barrasso said in a statement, “he needs to exaggerate the benefits.”

This summer, a group of conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill introduced a bill that would prohibit the federal government from using the social cost of carbon in the rulemaking process.

Nick Loris, vice president of public policy at the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions, or C3 Solutions, has raised a more nuanced set of concerns.

“I do believe there’s a social cost of carbon and that increased carbon in the atmosphere increases costs to the economy and our ecology and the planet, and those damages will likely get worse in the future if we don’t mitigate emissions,” Loris said. He also said the team behind Thursday’s paper is rigorous and credible.

But the problem, he said, is that even peer-reviewed academic literature contains a range of different estimates for the true costs, depending on assumptions and methodologies and the possibilities of wild swings in policy between administration risks creating uncertainty among regulated industries.

It’s important to analyze the potential future economic damages posed by a warming planet and a worthwhile data point for policymakers and regulators, Loris said. But, he added, “it can’t be relied on as the singular number to justify a regulation or policy action.”

Why is the social cost of carbon important?

The value is an essential input in a lot of federal policymaking — whether to drill for oil, to boost the energy efficiency of appliances, to allow a power plant to continue burning coal. Setting the cost of carbon high would encourage clean energy projects, deter new coal leasing on federal acreage and influence the type of steel used in taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

“Getting the number right is critical,” Tamma Carleton said in an email. Carleton is an assistant professor of economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“A value that is too low means that we face excessive climate change risks, but a value that is too high imposes unwarranted emissions mitigation costs on the economy.”

She said Thursday’s paper includes the most up-to-date science and “marks a substantial improvement” upon estimates previously developed by the U.S. government.

The Biden administration “remains committed to accounting for the costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible,” said a spokeswoman for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. But the office did not say when it would make an update to the figure.

Even as the Trump administration was drastically reducing the social cost of carbon, Democratic-leaning states have pressed ahead with their own policies.

In late 2020, for instance, New York adopted a “value of carbon guidance” ranging between $79 and $125 that it will apply to policies and programs going forward. And other states such as Illinois, Colorado, Washington and Minnesota use the metric for various types of policy analysis or implementation, including in the electricity sector.

The city of Minneapolis also voted to impose a $42 per ton estimate for the costs of climate change several years back, though as Mayor Jacob Frey told The Washington Post in an interview last year, “Carbon does not respect borders.”

The emissions that come from Phoenix or Baltimore or Texas, he said, impact life in Minneapolis and other places. That is why a federal standard that factors in the true costs of climate change is essential, he said.

“It really should be baked into every decision.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/01/costs-climate-change-far-surpass-government-estimates-study-says/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=wp_energy_and_environment&wpisrc=nl_green

‘The Three Climateers’: Meet the new generation of Senate climate hawks

Singularly focused, they are credited with laying the groundwork for the shift among Senate Democrats from being climate cautious to climate advocates.

By Leigh Ann Caldwell and Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2022

When the largest climate bill in U.S. history passed the Senate this month, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) choked back tears.

“This is a planetary emergency, and this is the first time the federal government has taken action that is worthy of the moment,” he told reporters at the time. “Now I can look my kids in the eye and say we’re really doing something about climate.”

For Schatz, one of Congress’s most vocal climate hawks, the moment marked the triumphant culmination of a long, treacherous effort to muscle climate legislation through the upper chamber.

“It was relief,” Schatz said in an interview. “It was a celebration of the work that everybody had done, but most importantly to me is it represented hope that the United States government can address the biggest single challenge of this political generation.”

It was “a political miracle,” Schatz added.

Schatz, 49, embodies a new type of climate hawk on Capitol Hill — one that resonates with a younger generation of climate activists determined to win buy-in not just from environmentalists but also from farmers, ranchers, Native people, labor groups, low-income communities and corporations, too. Schatz, who chairs the Indian Affairs Committee, understood that the people who are affected must be brought into the effort.

He doesn’t do it alone. He and two of his colleagues, Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who is 50, and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is 66, teamed up over the past decade to craft a new model of persistent activism inside the power corridors of Congress alongside a growing climate-focused advocacy.

And they still work alongside other Democrats who have long prioritized climate, including Sen. Edward J. Markey (Mass.), 76, who spearheaded the failed 2010 cap-and-trade effort and the Green New Deal, and Sen. Thomas R. Carper (Del.), 75, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, and played a role in crafting the Democrats’ $370 billion climate bill.

Schatz has not attracted as much attention for his climate advocacy as Whitehouse, who has delivered nearly 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on the Senate floor to urge legislative action on global warming. But Schatz came to the Senate with climate credentials: He asked Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii’s governor at the time, to appoint him to serve the rest of longtime Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye’s term after Inouye’s death in 2012 because climate was Schatz’s top priority.

Schatz’s arrival gave Whitehouse, elected to the Senate in 2006 and its most vocal climate activist, a more soft-spoken partner. They began to strategize and plan to raise awareness and lay the foundation for legislation. They organized an overnight talk-a-thon on the Senate floor about climate in 2014 and introduced a bill to tax carbon emissions. Notably, moderate and vulnerable Democrats didn’t participate and the carbon tax bill didn’t go anywhere.

“This was like before everybody was worried about climate or before climate action was cool,” said Tiernen Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. Sittenfeld began working with Schatz on climate days after he arrived in D.C. “This used to be a much lonelier fight in Congress.”

Heinrich, a close friend of Schatz’s who built a solar car in college and drove it across the country, made the duo a trio when he joined the Senate in 2013.

The three men come from different parts of the country that are facing different, but equally dangerous, climate disasters.

In Hawaii, sea levels have risen about 10 inches since 1950, increasing the frequency of flooding for coastal communities. In New Mexico, a stretch of the Rio Grande recently ran dry for the first time in 40 years amid a historic megadrought. And in Rhode Island, rising ocean temperatures are straining the state’s lobster industry.

They have made climate change a primary focus of their Senate careers.

“ ‘The Three Climateers’ [is what] we have called ourselves at various times to try and cheer ourselves up,” Whitehouse said in an interview.

In November, they all flew to the COP26 U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Some attendees called them the “three amigos” because they appeared inseparable and they had the same message: The United States will be a leader on climate.

The three have been meeting every week since 2019 to plan legislative and social media campaigns around climate. They would speak regularly at weekly closed-door Democratic lunches to keep climate top of mind for their caucus.

Climate change was not always a winning issue for Democrats, and even now, Democratic strategists admit that it won’t play well in every district or state in November’s midterm elections, especially in areas where the economy is reliant on fossil fuels.

The lowest point for climate advocates was in 2010, when moderate Senate Democrats facing head winds in their reelection efforts urged President Barack Obama to walk away from a major cap-and-trade bill after a bruising fight to pass the Affordable Care Act. (He did.) Little has happened legislatively on climate since then. Until now.

The surprising political shifts that led to the climate bill’s passage

Slowly, the trio saw a shift in their colleagues.

Schatz said the climate movement — and the lawmakers’ persistence — transformed “an issue that used to divide Democrats into an issue that motivates and unites Democrats.”

“We reached the point in this Congress where it was a major issue for the vast majority of the caucus,” Heinrich said. “I think leadership and [Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)], in particular, responded to that. I mean, he saw the activism that was occurring in his home state and then also the way the entire caucus was making that a priority.”

Whitehouse said the Trump administration, which dramatically cut environmental regulations and withdrew from the Paris agreement with the backing of Republicans in Congress, helped the Democrats to coalesce.

“The absolutely foul and filthy way that they’ve dealt with pollution and energy issues was so flagrant and so appalling that even if this wasn’t your top issue, you just couldn’t help but be disgusted [by] what you saw in that administration,” Whitehouse said. “I think that had a very strong binding effect on the caucus.”

The Manchin negotiations

During negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on the Democrats’ climate and health-care bill, the Three Climateers were in constant contact with the White House, Schumer and his staff. They made clear that they wouldn’t kill a deal because of its imperfections. They weren’t in the room but said they trusted Schumer to represent their interests. The senators were also in constant contact with Manchin (as was nearly every other Democratic senator).

“We just wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Schatz said, but he acknowledged that they had to be flexible in accepting what was left out.

“The North Star from inside the Schumer team was always not so much politics but like how many million of metric tons of emissions can we avoid,” Heinrich said in an interview.

“I met with a group of them and I told them there might have to be things in there that we don’t like to reach an agreement with Manchin. They said get what you can, just make it a good bill,” Schumer said in a statement of Schatz, Whitehouse and Heinrich, as well as Sens. Markey, Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). “They had my back. They really did.”

While Schumer was negotiating with Manchin, Schatz was the lead progressive negotiator with Manchin on his desire to overhaul permitting for energy projects, a separate deal that was essential to the main bill. When the Schumer-Manchin talks fell apart, the permitting negotiations did, too.

Schatz encouraged the administration to move to a Plan B of executive actions and declaring a climate emergency both as an alternative and also hoping the threat of unilateral climate actions would motivate Manchin to come back to the table.

“He is skilled in the inside game, has strong policy chops, is a great communicator, builds alliances, and knows how to get things done,” Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff, said in a statement. “He works with a key group of Senate colleagues, who as a group, effectively drive climate action.”

Biden never declared that climate emergency and didn’t move on the executive actions because Schumer and Manchin reached a deal. It included a version of Schatz and Whitehouse’s bill to place a fee on methane emissions. Manchin and Schatz subsequently reached a deal on the permitting reform, which Congress will try to pass later this year.

Schatz, Whitehouse and Heinrich all say that the president signing the Inflation Reduction Act into law is just the beginning of their work.

“I’m pretty confident that Martin and Brian and I are going to be a little posse riding out to make sure that the action is forthcoming,” Whitehouse said.

Former senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who was part of a failed effort to pass the cap-and-trade climate bill in 2010, said she got a phone call from an emotional Schatz after the Inflation Reduction Act cleared the Senate.

“He’s part of a new generation of environmentalists, and he’s wonderful,” Boxer said. “He just called to say, ‘Thanks for laying the groundwork.’ ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/18/three-climateers-meet-new-generation-senate-climate-hawks/

The surprising political shifts that led to the climate bill’s passage

The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about global warming

By Steven Mufson, The Washington Post, Aug. 13, 2022

The world has changed dramatically since the last time Congress considered climate legislation.

Last time, it sought to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and the fossil fuel industry fought back hard. Not this time.

Last time, some Republicans supported the measure, harking to an era when environmental protection was not so polarizing. Not this time.

On Friday, a dozen years after a sprawling climate bill passed the House but failed to move ahead in the Senate, Democrats successfully muscled the United States’ most ambitious climate change proposal ever past Congress, sending it to President Biden for his signature.

The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about how human-caused emissions would warm the planet.

Whereas President Jimmy Carter once pushed clean energy as a matter of personal, moral responsibility, the new bill treats climate change as a pragmatic pocketbook matter of consumer rebates and corporate tax incentives.

Whereas climate change once seemed distant, it is now a constant presence in shaping weather patterns, the economy and daily life in much of the world, especially during the harsh summer months.

And the energy industry has been largely silent on the climate bill, reflecting the legislation’s emphasis on subsidies for clean energy. BP, Shell and Holcim, the energy-intensive concrete and cement maker, were among dozens who joined a letter promoting the bill’s passage. Aside from fees and widely agreed-upon rules on potent methane leaks, there is a nearly complete dearth of limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

The current bill also shows how the Republican Party has evolved on climate and the environment. President Richard M. Nixon signed the first Clean Air Act. President George H.W. Bush said, “Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities. ... we must remember to treat them not as a given but as a gift.” And Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a system for capping carbon emissions.

Yet this week, not a single Republican in the Senate or the House voted for the climate bill.

But even as the legislation garnered only Democratic support, it was a far cry from other liberal proposals to deal with climate change, including the 2010 measure. Rather than being crafted by two liberal lions — then House member and now Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and former California congressman Henry Waxman — this current measure was shaped by arguably the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), and the centrist Democratic majority leader, Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.).

Markey, who helped draft the multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal in 2019, has evolved, too.

“I was angry,” said Markey describing his feelings in 2010. “I was in a rage that Senate rules would make it impossible to pass a bill that was absolutely necessary. And it did die. And because of that, I know that ending up with nothing is a political option. But it is not a planetary option.”

This time, Markey said, he told the president and party leaders that whenever the time came for reckoning on new legislation, he “would have their backs” and that he would tell climate activists that “it was a victory, and we would build on it in the years ahead.”

Above all, backers of the 730-page legislation dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — little in the bill deals with inflation — say it is overdue, coming decades after leading climatologist James Hansen testified in Congress and rang the alarm over global warming.

Now, with world leaders preparing to hold their next major climate summit in Egypt in November, developing countries look to the United States for leadership even while criticizing it for the greenhouse gases it emitted over the last century.

“No bill was ever going to make up for the U.S. Congress being 30 years too late to the party,” said Dan Lashof, the U.S. director of the World Resources Institute. “It’s a breakthrough, but we’re starting from a pretty deep hole that we need to dig out of.”

‘Moral crusade’

Carter was the first president to talk about solar panels, but he did so as a moral issue.

“The problem in the 1970s, I think, is that Carter was not tuned into pocketbook issues,” said Meg Jacobs, a historian and senior research scholar at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. “He never sold it as green jobs or saving your pension savings. He saw it as a moral crusade.”

But it was Bush who made climate change an issue for the federal government. He signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and created the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research on climate change and its impacts. Bush also created a cap-and-trade program — a predecessor for the Waxman-Markey plan — to limit emissions of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.

The Republican Party continued to make climate change a bipartisan concern. McCain (R-Ariz.) spoke often of the need to slow climate change, and he, along with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), touted the virtues of an economywide cap-and-trade program.

In 2008, both candidates for president backed plans to slow climate change. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) President Fred Krupp said that McCain was often hailed for his wartime sacrifice during the Vietnam generation but that he should be remembered for his efforts to tackle climate change and save future generations.

President George W. Bush was a stout defender of the oil and gas industry, but he also recognized the strength of the climate issue. In February 2002, he set a very modest target to reduce the greenhouse gas emission intensity of the U.S. economy by 18 percent by 2012. (In fact, the intensity dropped about 40 percent over that period, as cars, buildings and industry became more energy efficient.)

“The issue of climate change respects no border,” he said in July 2001. “Its effects cannot be reined in by an army nor advanced by any ideology.”

‘Broadening consensus’

Two decades later, Republican support for climate legislation has crumbled — not in the face of an advancing army but from within.

But EDF’s Krupp said support for climate change is now growing across party lines, especially among young people. And polling by Yale University’s program on climate change shows that “the gap between Republican and Democratic views on global warming is smaller for Millennials than for older generations, indicating that there is less political polarization over this issue among younger Americans.”

“To say it is partisan obscures the broadening consensus on this,” Krupp said. “Young people are demanding change, and I think their voices have been heard loud and clear.”

He also noted that in just a few years, Manchin went from a Senate campaign ad in which he tacked a copy of Markey’s cap-and-trade bill to a tree and fired his rifle at it to being a leading advocate of the new legislation. “Yes, he modified some pieces,” Krupp said, “but he didn’t gut them and didn’t seek to gut them.”

One simple measure to slow climate change would have been a carbon tax, favored by a bipartisan array of economists — including Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist William Nordhaus, a Democrat, and N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard professor. Many business executives, including some from major oil companies, also support it.

“In the big picture from a policy perspective, we know the right answer: Put a price on carbon so people innovate away from carbon and every business has an interest in solving the carbon problem,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former adviser to McCain and now president of the American Action Forum.

The Inflation Reduction Act, he said, “does the opposite. Instead of imposing a price, it is trying to get the same outcome by using a massive subsidy scheme.” He predicted it would be uncoordinated and feared it would be ineffective. “It’s all over the map,” he said.

The new legislation has scattered dozens of different tax provisions, targeting specific sectors or beneficiaries: only certain kinds of electric vehicles; battery makers and rare mineral miners only from North America; a green bank whose loans would lean partly toward environmental justice; offshore drilling and solar tax incentives; rural electric cooperatives; nuclear reactor plants whose operators have threatened to close down; and a variety of energy-efficient home appliances and building materials.

Biden administration officials say the president deserves credit for embracing a hodgepodge approach back in 2019.

“He made a really specific decision there that I think is critical,” said Stef Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who helped craft the campaign’s climate plan and who now serves as a deputy assistant to Biden. “That is the core of the plan that the president put forward in 2019, which was, in retrospect, a very big pivot moment for Democrats and national politics.”

Later Biden administration officials were able to win support from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as well as the Edison Electric Institute, a utility industry trade group that last December was one of the first industry groups to urge Democrats to resume talks after one of the many breakdowns.

“We spent a lot of time at the president’s direction engaging with building trust and bringing in these critical stakeholders across this coalition of labor [and] across this coalition of business,” Biden climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in a phone interview this week. “And I think that’s just fundamentally what made this more of a durable and resilient play over time.”

Markey said that the incentives in the new legislation have bigger foundations to build upon than in the past, comparing the Inflation Reduction Act to the 1990s Telecommunications Act.

Until 2009, when he was writing his cap-and-trade bill, there was a grand total of about 2,000 megawatts of solar in the United States, Markey said. Last year alone, 24,000 megawatts of new solar were installed, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Also in 2009, he said, there was a total of 25,000 megawatts of wind power countrywide. In 2021 alone, 17,100 megawatts were installed, the EIA said. Even oil companies such as BP and Shell are financing wind turbines off the northeast coast.

This year, solar is expected to account for half of all new electricity generation.

“That’s why I’m an optimist,” Markey said.

World Resources Institute director Lashof is also optimistic. He noted that the Congressional Budget Office issues estimates of spending bills, but that the cost of tax credits and other incentives are inherently uncertain and could be much larger than forecast. For example, the CBO estimated that the $7.5 billion estimate for the cost of the tax credit for electric vehicles would cover 100,000 to 200,000 vehicles a year over a 10-year period. But the auto industry is expecting much more. A Consumer Reports survey found that half of new car buyers would be likely to buy an electric vehicle with price incentives.

Despite the breadth of the bill, some items are still missing. Lashof pointed out that the legislation doesn’t include funding for international climate action, angering countries that have pressed for money to pay for adaptation and damages from past emissions. On the domestic side, the bill did not provide money for transmission lines, although some funds were included in the earlier infrastructure bill. And the Green New Deal Network complained about the oil and gas lease sales in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico and the failure to include $30 billion for a Civilian Climate Corps.

“These omnibus bills are always patchworks of different things,” said Jacobs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. “But there must be some sort of guiding principle and philosophy.” Moreover, she said, Democrats demonstrated pragmatism, knowing that next year they could lose control of Congress and once again get nothing.

“The compromises in this legislation are actually pretty minor,” former vice president Al Gore said in an interview. “If you look at the legislation through the lens of carbon reductions, the few provisions that I would have certainly opposed are extremely minor in terms of the carbon compared to the massive advances in the bulk of the legislation. This was a tremendous accomplishment.”

The American Action Forum’s Holtz-Eakin was less enthusiastic. “Successful legislation is never great. It is always by people slightly disgruntled about what they had to give up,” he said. “It did get across the finish line,” he added. That much, at least “has to be acknowledged.”

Dino Grandoni contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/13/surprising-political-shifts-that-led-climate-bills-passage/

Coastal Flooding in the U.S. on the Rise as Sea Levels Climb, Scientists Say

A new NOAA report says the problem of seawater spilling into communities along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts is likely to worsen

By Eric Niiler, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 2, 2022

Flooding along U.S. coasts has become more frequent in recent years and is likely to worsen, government scientists said in a new report. Unusually high tides driven by rising seas sloshed water onto coastal areas more than 500 times over the past year, according to the report.

The Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts will experience this so-called high-tide or sunny-day flooding an average of three to seven days between May 2022 and April 2023, according to projections in the annual report, which was released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That is the same as during the preceding year but up from an average of two to six days of flooding between May 2019 and April 2020.

Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, high-tide coastal flooding now occurs twice as frequently as it did in 2000, according to the report.

Although not as destructive as flooding associated with storms, sunny-day flooding can pose a nuisance to motorists, pedestrians and landowners as seawater surges over sea walls and bubbles up from storm drains before retreating hours later. Coastal floods can also force affected communities to find ways to ease the inconvenience and mitigate the damage—in much the same way that some northern communities develop detailed ways to cope with heavy snowfall.

“There are communities now that are starting to realize that there’s an expense to flooding,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer with NOAA’s National Ocean Service and an author of the report. “It’s like snow days in the Northeast when you have to have enough trucks, salt and people budgeted. With flooding, you have to pay police to close the street, you have to get enough pumps, you have to pay for overtime.”

The report projected even more severe increases in the long term, with 45 to 70 days of flooding per 12-month period by 2050.

For the report, the NOAA scientists gathered tidal records from past decades and current tidal data from 97 stations across the U.S. and compared them with satellite imagery showing existing sea levels across a swath of the U.S. coastline. The scientists then modeled future high-tide flooding using that data along with estimates of sea level rise from the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in February 2022.

High-tide flooding results when seawater surges at least 1.75 feet above normal high-tide levels. It is caused not by the storms and heavy rain that typically cause inland flooding but by rising seas, the scientists said in the report. Sea levels are rising as the world’s oceans warm and their volumes expand and as polar ice sheets melt, according to a 2019 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Sea level rise is the most important cause of high-tide flooding,” said Thomas Wahl, assistant professor of civil, environmental and construction engineering at the University of Central Florida. In addition, he said, high tides in some areas have been amplified by changes to the contours of riverbeds and seafloors resulting from the dredging of coastal waterways.

A study co-authored by Dr. Wahl and published in 2021 in the journal Science Advances identified 18 locations where such dredging worsened high-tide flooding, including New York City, Wilmington, N.C., and Cedar Key, Fla.

Sea level rise is also being driven by the loss of seawater-absorbing wetlands to coastal development and by the sinking of land overlying reservoirs from which freshwater has been pumped for drinking or other uses.

South Florida has been hit especially hard by high-tide flooding between September and November, when the year’s highest tides occur. The high tides during these months, known as king tides, are amplified by seasonal ocean currents and warm ocean temperatures along the Florida coast that bring seas to their highest levels for the year. Between May 2022 and April 2023, the NOAA report predicts, the Miami area will be hit with three to six days of high-tide flooding. That is expected to rise to 35 to 60 days during that same 12-month period in 2050, the report said.

A 2021 report by the Urban Land Institute estimated that such flooding could cause South Florida more than $4.2 billion in property damage by 2040. That number will top $53 billion by 2070, the report said.

Fort Lauderdale plans to spend $200 million over the next five years to install seawater pumps in low-lying areas, said Nancy Gassman, the city’s assistant director of public works. But she said the initiative would bring only temporary relief.

“You can’t pump the ocean. In certain locations you will just pump it out and the tide will just bring it back,” Dr. Gassman said, adding that “we have to be smart about where we target areas for development and recognize certain neighborhoods will be reclaimed by the ocean.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coastal-flooding-in-the-u-s-on-the-rise-as-sea-levels-climb-scientists-say-11659460994?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=1