Congress is out of Capital City for the July 4th holiday and won’t return until the week of July 9th. Capitol Light postings will be light during the period.
Water, water—nowhere and soon? Freshwater shortages, once considered a local issue, are increasingly a global risk. In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round. (The Guardian)
Comment: Water scarcity is both a result of Earth’s warming and itself one of the great existential problems of our time. It is also a catalyst for large population movements from less developed to more developed nations .
Running in circles can be good. According to RMI, a circular battery economy—one in which used batteries are repurposed or recycled—can help decrease the harms associated with battery production while at the same time strengthening the EV battery supply chain. By repurposing and recycling EV batteries, we will decrease our reliance on virgin materials and the suffering associated with their extraction. We will also reduce the risk of supply chain interruptions due to changing trade alliances, geopolitics, and extreme weather.
There’s no existing financial incentive to reuse or recycle batteries: today, it’s cheaper to produce new ones using the current linear processes. For instance, the only minerals that currently return a profit once recycled are cobalt and nickel.
By enacting battery circularity frameworks, recycling and repurposing used EV batteries can become self-sustaining or even profitable. Without effective battery circularity policies, this market will likely go the way of plastic recycling, which, in the United States, is currently at 8 percent.
Getting it out the door. 200 and counting. The Biden administration says developers have announced nearly 200 new clean energy projects since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) became law. (The Hill)
Comment: The administration is doing all that it can to get IRA money out the door—not only because of its commitment to combatting climate change. Obligating available funds also protects them from efforts by Republican members of Congress—and Democrat Joe Manchin (D-WV) who are displeased with the Act or believe the administration is not spending the dollars wisely.
Not a float you’ll see in the Macy’s parade. A 144 MW project in Maine will generate local performance data that propels large-scale floating wind deployment, if it passes environmental tests.
The 144 MW project would be located 20 nautical miles off the coast of Maine and developed by Aqua Ventus, a partnership between Mitsubishi subsidiary Diamond Offshore Wind and German energy group RWE.
Comment: It’s possible that floating wind platforms miles offshore will help to solve the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) problems that wind and solar are facing when it comes to siting large-scale solar and wind projects in places they’ve never been before.
According to a recent Columbia Law School report there are 228 local restrictions against siting wind, solar and other renewables, as well as 293 lawsuits challenging local projects. NIMBY conflicts are likely to increase signfiicantly over the next five years in lockstep with the growing number of proposed projects.
Batten down the hatches: Half of the U.S. population has faced extreme weather in the last six weeks, including heat waves, tornadoes and wildfires. (Guardian)
We’re way behind. Americans need to annually buy an additional 14 million electric vehicles and appliances to keep the country on track for its net-zero goals, a report from electrification nonprofit Rewiring America finds. (Grist)
Work in the new economy. According to Politico the renewable energy industry is hiring at roughly double the rate of the oil and gas industry, according to LinkedIn data.
Renewable energy’s hiring rate has outpaced that of oil and gas since March 2020, with the gap continuing into 2023. LinkedIn calculates its hiring rate by taking the ratio of hires and dividing that by its total membership. That data is indexed to 2016.
The number of renewable jobs posted on LinkedIn this year was the highest ever. And in the first three months of this year, there were 69 percent more renewable energy jobs posted compared with the same period a year earlier, according to LinkedIn.
Oil and gas job postings during that time period grew by 57 percent. Overall, the solar industry is hiring the fastest across all sectors. (Politico)
Comment: The employment numbers for the renewable energy sector are consistent with the fact that solar and wind are the overwhelming sources of new power gener-ation. The trend is up and will continue to stay up well into the 2030s.
Biden trumps Trump. The Biden administration proposed bringing back rules to protect imperiled plants and animals as officials moved to reverse changes under former President Donald Trump that weakened the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it would reinstate a decades-old regulation that mandates blanket protections for species newly classified as threatened.
The blanket protections regulation was dropped in 2019 as part of a suite of changes to the application of the species law that were encouraged by industry, even as extinctions accelerate globally due to habitat loss and other pressures.
Officials also would no longer consider economic impacts when deciding if animals and plants need protection. And the rules make it easier to designate areas as critical for a species’ survival, even if it is no longer found in those locations. (AP)
Comment: Should Trump retake the White House the on-again/off-again cycle that has plagued federal climate policymaking since the dawn of the 21st century would continue.
What a gas. More than a dozen environmental groups asked the Biden administration today to crack down on methane emissions from landfills, arguing in a new petition that the EPA’s current standards do not go far enough to crack down on the nation’s third-largest source of methane in the U.S.
According to the petition, by implementing two additional practices—upgrading technology used to burn off landfill gas and expanding the system used to capture gas after it’s burned off—the administration can save roughly 466,000 metric tons of methane annually.
It also recommended additional actions, such as lowering the threshold for which landfills have to install controls and improve monitoring.
Comment: Biden is facing pushback from progressive climate activists in and out of Congress because of things like licensing extraction of fossil fuels from federal lands and offshore. His support for the NEPA reforms and the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt ceiling and budget negotiations are among the more recent flashpoints. How the disappointment and outright opposition to some of the administration’s policies and programs will playout in the upcoming election bears watching.
You’re not our kind of people. Far-right Republicans are reportedly discussing a purge of their House Freedom Caucus group, expelling members they believe have become too cozy with party leaders or who are not doing enough to promote the group's aims.
At least two hardliners have discussed — and proposed to Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — trying to boot members who no longer meet the group’s standards, according to three Republicans with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity. The lawmakers declined to name who’s behind the ouster calls, underscoring the sensitivity of the situation.
Comment: Serious divisions within the GOP congressional ranks—particularly in the House—threaten to bring the federal government to an abrupt halt because Speaker McCarthy doesn’t have control of his own caucus. Although, he’s in good company as the two Republican speakers before him—Boehner and Ryan—chose to leave politics because of the dysfunction of Congress at the hands of hardliners.
The irony here is that among the members Perry and his conservative colleagues would like to give the boot to is Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The idea that Greene, who is a close ally of Trump and has spoken to white power groups, embraced Q-Anon and all its bizzare claims, and would like to see the South and portions of the Midwest secede from the Union, is not far-right enough boggles the mind.
Image courtesy of Bisakha Datta and Unsplash