Bipartisan bill would lay groundwork for U.S. carbon tariffs

By Emma Dumain, E&E News, June 8, 2023

Senators from both parties have signed on to legislation that would calculate the emissions intensity of industrial materials produced in the United States.

It’s a necessary step, advocates say, toward a carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, that would slap tariffs on carbon-intensive imports.

“We need our own math,” said George David Banks, a conservative climate adviser and former climate official in the Trump administration. “The Europeans are moving forward with their own CBAM … and [they] will come up with our own math for us.”

But the effort in the Senate also underscores the challenges lawmakers face in creating a climate trade policy to harmonize with the European Union: Of the myriad CBAM frameworks currently under development on Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle, a bill that would just mandate a study is so far the only measure that has been able to attract bipartisan consensus.

“It’s easier to take a second step once you’ve taken a first step,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “It can create a little momentum, but at the very least it creates a baseline from which to work, and it gets people thinking about it in a different context than, ‘Oh, my God, it’s a carbon tax.’”

Cramer, with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), on Wednesday introduced the “Providing Reliable, Objective, Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency (PROVE IT) Act.”

The bill would require the Department of Energy to study and determine the emissions intensity of nearly two dozen products made in the United States and by G-7 countries, free-trade agreement partners, foreign countries of concern and “countries that hold a substantial global market share for a covered product.”

The list of “covered products” would include aluminum, iron, steel, plastic, crude oil, lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.

The Energy Department would have two years to compile a report on its findings, in consultation with EPA, the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce and State departments. An update of the data would have to be published every five years.

“Studying emissions intensity is not easy; it will take some time, it is complex, and, in particular, figuring out a fair process for imposing tariffs on countries that don’t have any transparency around their emissions is also going to be a complex part of any border carbon adjustment mechanism,” Coons said Wednesday.

“So given there’s a bipartisan group that was interested in moving forward on this, I thought it was important that we introduce this piece and lay the foundation for the rest of the conversation.”

Coons has introduced more comprehensive CBAM proposals in the past, while Cramer confirmed this week he is continuing to work on crafting a “trade deal” that could be reconciled with what the European countries are already doing.

Joining Coons and Cramer as original co-sponsors of the bill are Sens. Angus King (I-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.)., Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

Whitehouse is another longtime sponsor of CBAM legislation, proposing bills in previous Congress sessions that would have imposed a domestic price on carbon — something that might be necessary for ensuring a CBAM’s enforceability by the World Trade Organization but has long been politically divisive and not currently a part of the conversation in Congress.

Cassidy told E&E News on Wednesday that he was looking at “early July” for introduction of what is expected to be the first comprehensive, Republican-led CBAM bill, which he will call the “Foreign Pollution Act.”

‘Wise and prudent’

In brief interviews, both Cassidy and Whitehouse said the “PROVE IT Act” would in no way impede separate legislative efforts or pursuits of more comprehensive policies.

“It’s a very nice lead to what we’ve been talking about — a very nice lead — because in our legislation we’ll specify a role for the national labs in terms of establishing pollution intensity for various products,” Cassidy said.

“The focus on the border tariff is the key, and the E.U. CBAM is coming at us one way or another, so that will provide a significant forcing event, and this adds information,” Whitehouse agreed. “It’s a fairly small thing, we can move quickly, we can get more information, and that’s — it’s all good.”

One reason the CBAM concept has gained so much traction among conservatives is that there’s more to it than just a mechanism to fight global emissions and beat the climate crisis: It also would punish other countries, like China, that are producing goods with higher carbon intensities than the United States without consequences.

Whitehouse and Coons have both suggested that language related to a carbon tariff could make its way into a legislative package to boost U.S. competitiveness with China — a follow-up to last year’s CHIPS and Science Act. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants Democrats and Republicans to work on the package together.

But it’s not clear whether the blueprints from Whitehouse, Coons, Cassidy and Cramer will align in time to become a part of “CHIPS 2.0,” nor is it certain there will even be a “CHIPS 2.0” to include it.

In the meantime, the “PROVE IT Act” can fill a necessary void while fulfilling a necessary function, said Greg Bertelsen, CEO of the Climate Leadership Council, which is working with congressional offices on CBAM proposals.

For one thing, he said, mandating a study of U.S. products’ carbon intensity that would take two years from the date of enactment of the bill could actually take care of an important part of the equation while members of Congress reconcile their disagreements on the larger issues.

For another, he continued, the “PROVE IT Act” responds not only to a practical need but also a desire from lawmakers.

“I’ve met with more than one Republican office who is interested in this space but watching with some concern as the E.U. develops their CBAM and recognizing that U.S. exporters are going to be subject to a program — and an adjustment — determined by the E.U. regulators” Bertelsen explained.

“The Republican members I’ve met with, their view is the U.S. should have its own opinion about what the carbon intensity of our products are.”

To Bertelsen’s point, Murkowski told E&E News she had signed on to the bill for the very purpose of learning more.

“Whether it’s something that would move us in the direction [of] — whether it’s the price on carbon or the border adjustment … I think it’s going to be important to know a little bit more about of the impact of all this,” she said.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/bipartisan-bill-would-lay-groundwork-for-u-s-carbon-tariffs/

Electric vehicles appeal to conservative buyers sick of gas guzzlers

A few red counties in Texas are experiencing higher-than-average EV growth, as drivers tire of gas prices and chase the latest tech

By Jeanne Whalen, The Washington Post, June 5, 2023

PLANO, Tex. — Tony Federico bought his Tesla Model 3 in 2018. A former Marine who votes Republican, Federico said he was drawn by the cool technology and the chance to save money on gas.

“I think selfishly it was, you know, how is this going to help my pocketbook,” he said from his living room one recent morning. Environmental concerns were “not really” on his radar, said the head of the local Tesla owners club.

Electric vehicles are often associated with liberal coastal types who speak of saving the planet. But in this Republican stronghold north of Dallas, more and more people are deciding that driving an EV is just common sense.

In Collin County, home to Plano, EV market share is well above the national average and growing fast, reaching 8.7 percent of new-vehicle registrations last year, according to S&P Global Mobility. In neighboring Denton County, also reliably red, EVs grew to 7.3 percent of the market. Nationwide, electric cars were about 6.2 percent of new-vehicle registrations last year.

Battle to dethrone Tesla heats up just as Musk is distracted by Twitter

Some EV buyers in the Plano area expressed concern about the climate, but most said they were drawn by the performance, style and high-tech features of the vehicles — and the convenience and savings of avoiding the gas pump.

“I used to drive a Mercedes-Benz SUV and I went to go fill up my gas tank and it was over $4 for premium gas. So I went the very next day, and I traded it in for an electric vehicle,” said Kate Allen, sitting in her Model 3, sipping iced coffee while she charged. The possibility of helping the environment was a “bonus” — not her main motivation, she added.

Allen, a Republican voter who lives in nearby Frisco, works as a property manager in Dallas’s Uptown neighborhood. A year ago, hers was the only EV parked at one of the residential buildings she manages. Now there are half a dozen.

For the Biden administration, it doesn’t really matter why drivers choose EVs, so long as they choose them. Rapidly scaling up EV adoption is a centerpiece of the administration’s green-energy agenda, which is using tax credits and other incentives to try to make plug-in vehicles account for half of new vehicle sales by 2030. Hitting that target would mean reducing U.S. greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions by up to 9 percent by 2030, according to Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

Nationwide, most of the counties with the highest EV uptake are predictably blue and often high-income, but pockets of red are springing up. Florida’s St. Johns County, home to St. Augustine; Indiana’s Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis; North Carolina’s Union County, southeast of Charlotte; New Jersey’s seaside Monmouth County; and California’s Kern County, home to Bakersfield, are among the areas that voted for Trump in 2020 and had higher-than-average EV market-share growth last year, S&P data shows.

Conservative support for green energy isn’t a totally new phenomenon, says Neal Farris, a left-leaning photographer and EV enthusiast in Dallas who promotes the vehicles at auto shows and Earth Day events. “One of the people I quote a lot is T. Boone Pickens,” he said, referring to the oil billionaire and longtime Republican donor who embraced renewable energy late in life. “He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do solar, let’s do wind, because if we do, then the oil will last longer.’”

To be sure, there are plenty of regions in Texas where EV skepticism remains high and chargers are tough to find. Federico volunteers with a Christian ministry group that visits prisoners near small-town Palestine, Tex., and he makes sure to charge up at home before driving. “I couldn’t plug in there if I wanted to,” he said.

And the powerful oil and gas lobby still holds a lot of sway in the state, said Tom “Smitty” Smith, head of the Texas Electric Transportation Resources Alliance.

But even some Republican lawmakers who have long supported the oil-and-gas industry have begun sponsoring a few bills that favor EVs, partly because their wealthy constituents are buying the cars, Smith said. “They are seeing [EVs] all over the Republican communities,” he said. “And they are seeing them with people who are seen as political and intellectual leaders in their communities.”

One Republican-sponsored bill recently signed by Gov. Greg Abbott fast-tracks infrastructure upgrades to support charging, among other things. Another awaiting the governor’s signature would ensure that public chargers clearly post their pricing. A third recently signed into law, however, creates a $400 registration fee for EV drivers and a $200 annual renewal fee thereafter, to recoup money that drivers aren’t paying through gasoline taxes.

Buzz Smith, an electric advocate in Fort Worth who calls himself “The EVangelist,” said he has had executives from Exxon and other oil companies approach him at auto shows and whisper their interest in electrification. “They say they are retiring and their next car will be an EV,” he said.

In some Dallas-area households, electric vehicles are now sharing garages with gas-fired pickup trucks. That’s often true on a national level, too. Ford F-series trucks are the top garage mate for the Mustang Mach-E and three other electric cars in the United States, while Chevy’s Silverado truck is the most common garage mate for the Bolt EV, according to S&P Global Mobility.

Greg Nipper, a tech-industry manager who lives in north Dallas, bought a Tesla Model 3 in 2018, parking it at home next to his Ford F-150 pickup. Soon, he decided to ditch the truck.

“I’ve always been a pickup person, but the enjoyment of driving that [Tesla] was enough that I traded my pickup for a second Model 3,” said Nipper, a registered Democrat who has voted more Republican in recent elections. The convenience of charging at home also won him over. “No oil change, no going to the gas station. Simply plug in at night and wake up with a full charge.”

The prevalence of software, semiconductor and telecom companies in the area north of Dallas means there are plenty of well-heeled buyers eager for the latest technology.

Federico, who works in the IT industry, has seen the number of electric vehicles balloon since he bought one. Waiting at a red light one recent morning, after dropping his daughter off at school, he counted more than a dozen Teslas whizzing by. “There’s a Y. There’s a 3. There’s a 3, There’s a Y,” he pointed, ticking them off in the 90 seconds before the light changed.

In his spare time, Federico runs a local Tesla owners club that meets up for social events or coffee hangouts at charging stations. Gathering on the top floor of a Plano parking garage on a recent morning, club members chatted about their cars and passed out club information to other Tesla owners who were killing time while charging.

The drivers mostly swapped stories about the rapid growth of EVs and chargers in their area, but also a few reminders that they are still in Texas.

Dressed in a Tesla Cyber Truck hat and a “My Car Runs on Sunshine” T-shirt, club member John Packer said it is not uncommon for EV drivers to encounter antisocial or passive aggressive behavior. Sometimes gas-powered pickup trucks park in front of charging stations, even when plenty of other spots are available, just to block them. “There is a challenge, because this is an oil state,” said Packer, a Democrat who drives a Model Y and owns a logistics company that uses 16 electric Rivian vans for deliveries.

On a national level, the top dozen counties for EV market-share growth last year were all in California, according to S&P data, followed by counties near Seattle, D.C., Boulder, Colo., New York and Portland, Ore.

Travis County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Austin, is the Lone Star state’s top county for EV market-share growth, ranking 28th nationally. But the next two Texas counties, ranking 43 and 52, are Collin and Denton, which have long voted red and supported Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections.

In Denton County, one entrepreneur and his partner are so pro-electrification that they’ve started a small business converting classic cars into EVs.

Bill Schofield, a two-time Trump voter who describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, got interested in EVs a decade ago, when he was among the first 2,000 customers to buy a Tesla Model S.

Schofield didn’t think the vehicles were going to help the environment much, and he still doesn’t. He was chasing the latest technology.

“I think the Democrats think they’re saving the planet, because they didn’t do the real math to see that — oh, no, they’re not,” he said. “The Republicans and conservatives, they bought it because it was the cool new technology.”

After falling in love with his Tesla’s performance and high-tech perks, Schofield bought an electric Porsche Taycan and an electrified Mercedes EQS, with the tidy sum he made selling his electrical distribution business. He also started the business converting classic cars, which he now runs with his colleague, Kevin Emr.

In their roadside garage in Denton, they showed off a dozen vintage cars they are overhauling — a 1965 Shelby Cobra, a 1968 Camaro, a 1959 Corvette — by swapping out the gasoline engines for electric motors and batteries. The switch makes them drive beautifully, with all the torque and power of a modern electric vehicle and little of the rattling and glitchiness of an old gasoline car, they said.

“If you’ve driven [an EV], you’ve realized how convenient they are to own and drive,” said Emr, an engineer and racecar driver who has a Rivian SUV on order. His father-in-law, a longtime Ford driver who favored pickup trucks and SUVs, recently bought Ford’s electric Mustang Mach E. “No more gas station trips, no more oil changes. No more maintenance, no drips in your garage, no smells. Everything just works.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/05/ev-conservative-buyer-uptick/

The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring.

Op-ed by Brian Deese, The New York Times, May 30, 2023

Deese was the director of the National Economic Council for the first two years of the Biden administration and helped shape the Inflation Reduction Act.

Last summer, in a meeting with business and labor leaders as Congress prepared to vote on the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden argued that it would result in “the largest investment ever in clean energy and American energy security — the largest in our history.” He added, “It will be the largest investment in American manufacturing as well.”

Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The law is doing exactly what it was designed to do: encourage private investment in clean energy. Tax incentives make the investments attractive, but businesses, along with rural cooperatives, nonprofits and others, must judge whether investing their own money in a hydrogen factory or a wind farm will pay off. In the end, the law will be only as successful as their appetite to invest at a scale that will meaningfully reduce emissions warming the planet and increase the nation’s energy security.

Over the past few months, we have begun to see how large that appetite may be. It seems clear already that the law will stimulate significantly more investment in clean energy than was at first thought possible while generating more revenue from high-income taxpayers to reduce the deficit.

But despite all the encouraging signs, still more needs to be done to achieve the nation’s climate goals and energy needs. For instance, the often cumbersome and time-consuming process of siting and building clean energy projects must be streamlined. And Congress needs to take additional steps to reduce emissions from heavy industries like steel, cement and chemicals.

But let’s first see how far the country has come since the I.R.A. became law. Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. That is more than in the prior four years combined. The pipeline of battery plants amounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021 and enough to power nearly 20 million homes.

Scott Moskowitz, the head of market strategy and public affairs for Qcells North America, which manufactures solar panel components in Georgia, summed up the impact of the law this way: “We will always look at the history of our industry in two eras now that the Inflation Reduction Act has passed” — meaning the before and the after.

“The I.R.A. contains some of the most ambitious clean energy manufacturing incentives enacted anywhere in the world,” Mr. Moskowitz said.

The investment appetite is defying geographic and political boundaries. From Oklahoma and Ohio to North Carolina and Nevada, new investment is breathing economic life into communities that have seen their economies decline. This is in part because the I.R.A. provides an explicit incentive to invest in places with contaminated industrial sites, communities with a significant economic reliance on traditional fossil fuel production or those with shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants.

The investment surge has prompted forecasters to significantly update their views on the long-term potential of the law. Analysts at two research organizations, the Brookings Institution and the Rhodium Group, have estimated that over 10 years, private investment could be at least one and a half to three times as much as initial projections. The largest increase is projected to be in industrial and manufacturing activity for hydrogen, carbon capture, energy storage and critical minerals — areas key to long-term energy security.

This overall investment wave has the potential to drive a more rapid and efficient decarbonization of the economy while increasing the supply of clean energy and maintaining the country’s competitive edge of stable, low-cost energy. Rhodium, for example, along with researchers from the University of Chicago, found that I.R.A. energy production tax credits would lower energy costs for consumers and businesses while reducing power sector carbon dioxide emissions at an average cost of $33 to $50 per metric ton — considerably less than recent estimates of the social cost of carbon, the economic damage that would result from emitting additional carbon.

But these early encouraging signs do not guarantee long-term success. The law did not provide all the necessary tools to achieve national goals for expanding our supply of clean energy. Congress and the Biden administration have more work to do.

First, lawmakers must make it easier to build clean energy infrastructure in America. Congress should immediately go beyond the permitting provisions included in the recently announced debt limit compromise bill and pass comprehensive legislation to speed energy development, an idea that has bipartisan support. The administration should use its authority to streamline project timelines. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should more aggressively clear backlogs preventing clean energy projects from connecting to the grid. Policymakers should consider new incentives to expand energy capacity, like conditioning federal assistance to states and localities that reform land-use policies to allow clean energy development.

Second, lawmakers should continue to encourage efficient, low-carbon investments. For example, Congress could develop an industrial competitiveness program for heavy industries like cement, steel and chemicals that includes an emissions-based border adjustment fee on imported industrial goods from countries with less ambitious emissions controls. This would bolster the I.R.A.’s incentives, increase the competitiveness of American industries and address China’s nonmarket practices in these areas, such as flooding the market with products at far below their fair value.

Third, we need to work with allies across developed and emerging markets to build a cooperative international framework around the I.R.A.’s investment incentives. Our allies have little to fear and much to gain from working with the United States to expand incentives domestically to deploy clean energy technology because it must be deployed everywhere, and the I.R.A. incentives will drive down the global cost of energy technologies. The administration has already forged agreements to harmonize these incentives with the European Union, Japan and Canada but will need to use all levers of its foreign policy to secure cooperative arrangements to build resilient energy supply chains, particularly for critical minerals.

Fourth, policymakers and the public need better tools to close the gap between splashy corporate clean energy announcements and speculative long-term projections to understand where investments are being made and what they are achieving.

Finally, policymakers should remain vigilant about budgetary effects. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the private sector’s enthusiasm for the I.R.A.’s clean energy incentives could increase the cost to the federal budget by about $200 billion over 10 years.

But that is only part of the overall calculation. The I.R.A. is about more than just clean energy. It also includes corporate tax increases and reductions in prescription drug spending by Medicare. That’s why the I.R.A. overall is still projected to reduce the deficit over 10 years, with the reduction growing to $50 billion a year by 2032.

Recent academic research has shown that the long-term deficit reduction could be much greater than these estimates anticipate, with the I.R.A.’s innovative investments in technology and audit capacity generating about $500 billion and potentially much more over the next decade. While it is a mistake to undercut those investments, the savings are achievable even with the rescissions to Internal Revenue Service funding included in the debt limit compromises.

If we build on the I.R.A.’s investment-driven model, the optimistic outcome of more clean energy, more economic potential and a stronger fiscal future is within reach.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/opinion/climate-clean-energy-investment.html

'More likely than not' world will soon see 1.5C of warming - WMO

By Gloria Dickie, Reuters, May 17, 2023

LONDON, May 17 (Reuters) - For the first time ever, global temperatures are now more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday.

This does not mean the world would cross the long-term warming threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But a year of warming at 1.5C could offer a glimpse of what crossing that longer term threshold, based on the 30-year global average, would be like.

With a 66% chance of temporarily reaching 1.5C by 2027, "it's the first time in history that it's more likely than not that we will exceed 1.5C," said Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre, who worked on the WMO's latest Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update.

Last year's report put the odds at about 50-50.

Even temporarily reaching 1.5C is "an indication that as we start having these years with 1.5C happening more and more often, than we are getting closer to having the actual long-term climate be on that threshold," said Leon Hermanson, also of the Met Office Hadley Centre.

It also means the world has failed to make sufficient progress on slashing climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Partially responsible for boosting the chance of soon hitting 1.5C is an El Niño weather pattern expected to develop in the coming months. During El Niño, warmer waters in the tropical Pacific heat the atmosphere above, lifting global temperatures.

The El Niño "will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory", said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press statement.

A mid-year switch to El Niño is worrying scientists across the world. The weather phenomenon, while distinct from climate change, is likely to boost extremes and bring warmer weather to North America and drought to South America, with the Amazon at greater risk of bad fires.

The likelihood of temporarily exceeding 1.5C has increased over time. Scientists had estimated just a 10% chance of hitting 1.5C between 2017 and 2021, for example.

Unlike the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate projections, which are based on future greenhouse gas emissions, the WMO update provides more of a prediction-based long-range weather forecast.

The WMO also found a 98% chance that one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, surpassing 2016 which saw a global temperature impacted by about 1.3C (2.3F) of warming.

"This report must be a rallying cry to intensify global efforts to tackle the climate crisis," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace UK.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-likely-than-not-world-will-soon-see-15c-warming-wmo-2023-05-17/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=051723

A Greenland glacier’s rapid melting may signal faster sea level rise

By Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, May 8, 2023

Scientists studying one of Greenland’s largest glaciers say it is melting far faster than expected in its most vulnerable region, a worrying sign that glaciers perched in the ocean could contribute to sea level rise more quickly than currently forecast.

The scientists fear the phenomenon observed at Petermann Glacier could be happening to other glaciers in both Greenland and Antarctica, possibly leading to faster, more dramatic levels of sea level rise worldwide — “potentially double” what is currently expected from glaciers, according to a study published Monday.

Using satellite measurements of its surface, researchers found that Petermann has been bouncing up and down, dramatically shifting its seafloor moorings in response to the tides. All this movement has carved a large cavern at the base of the glacier and allowed warm water to regularly stretch beneath it. As the glacier lifts and migrates, the water can rush in for over a mile, thinning the ice by as much a 250 feet a year in some places.

“You have this constant flushing of seawater going many kilometers below the glacier and melting the ice,” said Eric Rignot, one of the study’s authors and a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

“We think that could change sea level projections quite a bit,” he said. The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Petermann Glacier is, in the context of climate change, the next big thing that our greenhouse gas emissions may break. The vast glacier, some 10 miles wide, is one of several major outlets for ice to escape from Greenland’s interior into the ocean. In total, the massive region of ice queued up behind Petermann could, if it all melted, raise global sea levels by over 1 foot.

Petermann has not changed as much as some other Greenland glaciers, likely in part because it is so far north. But it has seen important shifts.

Petermann lost two massive chunks of ice from its floating ice shelf in 2010 and 2012, causing the shelf to lose roughly a third of its area. It has not since recovered.

The glacier has also started to move backward, as the central region of its grounding line — where it sits on the floor of the deep fjord — retreated more than 2 miles inland toward Greenland’s interior. This has occurred in response to a warming of the water in the fjord in front of the glacier. The warming only amounts to a fraction of a degree, according to Rignot, but the water is now slightly above zero degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit). But it is more than warm enough to melt ice, especially at the depths and pressures seen at the grounding line.

At the same time, the ice has begun to flow outward more rapidly, meaning that Petermann has swung from a more or less stable state to losing a few billion tons of ice to the ocean each year. It’s not that much compared with a few other major glaciers in Antarctica or Greenland, but it could be only the beginning.

All of this likely reflects changes at the grounding line, which is extremely difficult to observe. But satellites can detect both changes in the surface height of the glacier, which can be used to infer to what is going on beneath, and how glaciers respond to cycles in the tides.

This is what the new research captures at Petermann — showing that the tidal cycles have very large implications for the glacier’s melting. The satellites showed that there is no real grounding “line” — rather, there is a vast zone, over a mile in length, over which the glacier moves back and forward along the seafloor. This movement accelerates melting as it allows seawater to mix in close to and even beneath the glacier.

The research also found that a large cavity — 650 feet in height — has now been hollowed out in the center of the grounding line. It is nearly 8 square miles in area, and in this region, the ocean can enter and cause melting even without help from the tides that move and lift up the glacier.

All of this, according to the researchers, has a very large implication — we may need to adjust our current models to take into account rapid melting at the bobbing grounding lines of large glaciers. And this, in turn, could cause sea level rise projections from these behemoths to “potentially double,” the study suggests.

“Probably a lot of other glaciers are in that situation, with tidal flushing,” Rignot said. He believes that Petermann is, overall, a good analogue for what may also be happening in Antarctica, where there is far more ice at stake than in Greenland.

The research was conducted by scientists at the three U.S. institutions — the University of California at Irvine, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Houston — in collaboration with international colleagues at institutions in China, Finland, Germany and Italy.

Several scientists not affiliated with the study reached by The Washington Post were impressed by the new measurements, but not entirely convinced about their implications.

“The melt rates reported are very large, much larger than anything we suspected in this region,” said Hélène Seroussi, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College who uses models to study glaciers and sea level rise.

However, Seroussi said, the models that researchers use to project sea level rise — complex suites of equations that are used to predict how glaciers all over the world will respond to warmer oceans and air — would not immediately change based on the results of the current study.

“We are many years away from implementing these processes correctly in numerical models,” Seroussi said. “It is important to understand that there are always long delays between the discovery of a new process and its inclusion in numerical models as these processes need to be perfectly understood from a physical point of view,” requiring more research.

In particular, Seroussi said, the process in question is generally not included because the scale over which it operates is not fully understood. Until that happens, some models could show too much ice loss because of it, simply because they represent the process as playing out over too large of a region.

Andreas Muenchow, a scientist at the University of Delaware who studies Petermann Glacier, also had some cautionary notes.

“I very much like the idea of a ‘tidal heart beat’ of the glacier’s grounding zone, the glacier flapping up with warm water intruding during the incoming tide and flapping down with colder water exiting during the outgoing tide,” Muenchow said.

However, he noted that “the very high melt rates are real, but they are estimated over very small areas.”

“My main takeaway is that models need to be improved,” Muenchow concluded. “The study provides a sharper focus for what processes we need to study near floating glaciers in Greenland or Antarctica, if we want to project rising sea level into the future using models.”

Overall the new study again underscores that we don’t really know how quickly one of the largest consequences of climate change — sea level rise from the melting ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica — will occur. We’re still finding out new details — and new reasons to think that it could be faster than expected.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/08/sea-level-rise-greenland-glacier-melt/

We Desperately Need a New Power Grid. Here’s How to Make It Happen.

Editorial, The New York Times, May 4, 2023

To tap the potential of renewable energy, the United States needs to dramatically expand the electric grid between places with abundant wind and sunshine and places where people live and work. And it needs to happen fast. The government and the private sector are investing heavily in a historic shift to electric-powered vehicles, heating systems and factories, including hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending approved last year as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. But without new power lines, much of that electricity will continue to be generated by burning carbon. Unless the United States rapidly accelerates the construction of power lines, researchers at Princeton University estimate that 80 percent of the potential environmental benefits of electrification will be squandered.

The United States needs 47,300 gigawatt-miles of new power lines by 2035, which would expand the current grid by 57 percent, the Energy Department reported in February. A 2021 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine arrived at a similar figure. To hit that target, the United States needs to double the pace of power line construction.

The current power grid was constructed over more than a century. Building what amounts to a new power grid on a similar scale in a small fraction of that time is a daunting challenge. It will require tens of billions of dollars in financing, vast quantities of steel and aluminum and thousands of specialized workers. But building is the easy part. What makes the target virtually impossible to hit is the byzantine approval process that typically includes separate reviews by every municipality and state through which a power line will pass, as well as a host of federal agencies.

In 2005, for instance, the largest power company in Arizona proposed to build a transmission line to carry electricity to its customers from a new wind farm in Wyoming. Last month, after 18 years of legal battles and hearings and revisions, the TransWest Express project was finally approved. It still won’t be completed until 2028 at the earliest, though.

The most important change necessary to overhaul the permitting process is to put a single federal agency in charge of major transmission projects. Congress has empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve major natural gas pipelines, which helped to expedite construction during the fracking boom. It ought to be at least as easy to build renewable energy projects.

To achieve that goal, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Representative Mike Quigley, Democrat of Illinois, have proposed legislation that would endow the F.E.R.C. with the power to approve the routes of major electric transmission lines that pass through multiple states, replicating the power the agency already has over pipelines. Streamlining regulation to accelerate renewable energy development is a plan that both parties can embrace.

This federal pre-emption of state and local authorities would only apply to major projects of national importance, like the Grain Belt Express, a proposed power line stretching from Kansas to Indiana that has been pursuing state approvals for more than a decade, or the SunZia project between New Mexico and Arizona, which has been on the drawing board since 2006. Under the proposed legislation, state and local governments still would retain oversight of the small projects that make up more than 90 percent of all transmission projects.

The current approval process — or more accurately, the current jumble of approval processes — is a mess created by decades of well-intentioned efforts to prevent corporations from running roughshod over the interests of individuals, communities and the environment. Safeguarding those interests is important, but granting a veto to every community through which power lines may pass comes at the expense of other communities, and it causes other kinds of environmental damage.

Shifting decision-making from state and local governments to the federal government would create a single, national forum in which policymakers can weigh the costs and benefits of power projects. The federal government — the mechanism Americans have created to act in the interest of people in America as a whole — is where those decisions should be made.

The nation’s environmental laws, especially the National Environmental Policy Act, arose from a sensible desire to ensure that big projects didn’t cause big environmental problems. But members of both parties agree that over time the requirements imposed by the law, which requires careful examination of the impact of major projects, have become unnecessarily cumbersome. One recent analysis calculated that it takes the government a median period of 3.5 years to review renewable energy projects.

The competing environmental priorities of developing renewable energy and protecting existing ecosystems can be better balanced by imposing strict time limits on environmental reviews while also increasing funding to ensure regulators have the capacity to meet those deadlines. Congress also could expedite consideration of inevitable legal challenges by adopting a proposal recently highlighted by the Brookings Institution to send challenges to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Instead of waiting for companies to propose projects, the Energy Department also can accelerate construction — and focus private investment — by identifying where power lines should go and beginning the approval process before companies apply. The Inflation Reduction Act strengthened the federal government’s authority to engage in this kind of planning, but states have resisted federal encroachment on their authority and the Biden administration has declined to force the issue, emphasizing its desire to work with states.

In January, the administration celebrated a small victory, sending Vice President Kamala Harris to Arizona for the groundbreaking on the Ten West Link power line project between Arizona and California, which was first proposed in 2015. But far too many projects remain in limbo, in part because states and communities along power line routes have little incentive to quickly approve projects intended to deliver electricity somewhere else.

The nation’s transmission lines also are broken up into regional grids that operate like jealous petty potentates, resisting stronger links that would allow renewable energy to flow across regional boundaries. In the Midwest, where the Energy Department says the need for new power lines is greatest, the list of projects in limbo includes the SOO Green Line, proposed in 2012, which would carry electricity from Iowa to the outskirts of Chicago underground, alongside railroad tracks. The line would connect a grid called MISO, which covers part of the Plains region, with a grid called PJM, which serves parts of the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic and has opposed the project.

This Balkanization of the electric grid keeps costs unnecessarily high and makes it harder for utilities to meet surges in demand. In February 2021, more than 100 people froze to death in Texas, in part because the local grid operator, the Electric Reliability Organization of Texas, had limited capacity to draw power from neighboring grids. Congress can encourage a greater spirit of cooperation and help to combat climate change by mandating a minimum transfer capacity for each grid.

Congress and the Biden administration have taken a series of promising steps toward ending the nation’s dependence on carbon. But the absence of a plan to build a new electric grid is a critical hole in that emerging strategy. Without decisive action, they will waste a precious chance to limit climate change.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/nepa-permitting-reform.html