Tag: carbon emissions
Joe Biden

House Republicans Denounce Biden's Effort To Cut Carbon Pollution

White House senior adviser for clean energy innovation John Podesta cited recent climate change-fueled disasters on Wednesday in explaining the significance of the clean energy and climate action investments in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Republican National Committee and GOP members of Congress pounced on his statement, framing it as a shocking admission.

Podesta, who is overseeing the clean energy investments funded under the 2022 law, acknowledged at a press briefing that it was “a time of heartbreak as the toll of extreme weather, fueled by climate change, is being felt across the country and the world.” He said:

This summer has brought one climate disaster after another, from extreme heat in Arizona and Texas and across the Southeast, to floods in Vermont and upstate New York, to thick smoke from Canadian wildfires. And all of us have watched in horror as the Maui fires have claimed over 100 lives — the largest loss of life of a fire in the last 100 years in America. … To stop these disasters from getting even worse, we have to cut the carbon pollution that’s driving the climate crisis, and that’s what the Inflation Reduction Act is all about.

Podesta’s warnings are consistent with scientific consensus. NASA said on Monday that July 2023 was the hottest month on Earth since 1880, when global temperature recording began.

The RNC’s research team tweeted a clip of Podesta’s remarks and wrote, “Top Biden advisor John Podesta: ‘We have to cut the carbon pollution that’s driving the climate crisis and that’s what the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ is all about!’”

Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) retweeted that message. Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale wrote: “So the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ was never about reducing inflation. It was always about promoting the Left’s radical climate agenda. This is an insult to the hardworking taxpayers across America!”

“When I said it was the Green New Deal under another name, I wasn’t kidding,” tweeted Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. “Now they’re saying it too.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s deputy spokesperson Chad Gilmartin wrote, “Translation: Biden’s radical agenda is about to cost American families even more of their hard-earned money.”

While the Inflation Reduction Act is not actually the Green New Deal, a 2019 proposal to address climate change and other issues, it does include significant investments to help consumers lower their energy costs and carbon dioxide emissions.

The Energy Department estimated in August 2022 that by 2030, American families will save an average of $1,000 a year on energy costs due to tax credits and rebates for installing heat pumps, weatherizing homes, and switching to electric vehicles. The law did not raise taxes for anyone earning less than $400,000 annually.

In August 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group dedicated to climate change science, released a “code red for humanity” warning that humans are causing global warming and that immediate action is needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert catastrophe.

Republican lawmakers in Congress ignored that report and unanimously opposed the Inflation Reduction Act. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker denounced it as “socialism.”

The law’s investments have already spurred jobs in the clean energy sector in districts represented by House Republicans, but 217 of them voted in April for the Limit, Save, Grow Act, which would have repealed virtually all of those climate and clean energy investments.

On Wednesday, Biden tweeted: “One year ago, I signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law – delivering on the most ambitious climate action in history and lowering costs for hardworking families. We got it done together.”

Tennessee Republican Rep. John Rose tweeted the Biden comment, along with a headline about an August 10 Biden speech in which the president said: “The end result of a lot of these things — and, by the way, the Inflation Reduction Act — I wish I hadn’t called it that, because it has less to do with reducing inflation than it does to do with dealing with providing for alternatives that generate economic growth.”

“It’s been one year since President Biden signed the so-called ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ into law,” Rose wrote. “Now, Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud: it was never meant to reduce inflation! It was just another step closer to socialism.”

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

California Climate Plan Has Inland Condemning Coastal Elitism

California Climate Plan Has Inland Condemning Coastal Elitism

By Esme E. Deprez and James Nash, Bloomberg News (TNS)

The way inland California lawmakers see it, the only benefit to their constituents from Gov. Jerry Brown’s expansion of carbon pollution laws will be cleaner air to breathe as they wait at the unemployment office.

Brown and other Democrats are pushing legislation to reduce greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels to a fraction of what they were a quarter-century ago. The state would make utilities get a greater share of electricity from low-pollution sources, compel industries to cut smokestack emissions further and encourage cleaner cars on roads.

In a state of 39 million dominated by Democrats, politics falls along regional lines rather than partisan ones. Just as California’s north and south fight over water amid a record drought, the climate legislation has widened longstanding rifts between more affluent, Democratic-leaning cities along the coast and poorer, more conservative towns in the interior.

“Families losing their jobs cannot afford solar panels on their homes when they can no longer afford their homes because they have no job,” state Sen. Jeff Stone, a Republican from Riverside County, told colleagues during a debate on Senate Bill 350 this month. He called it “coastal elitism at the worst, an act that will cut jobs in Central Valley communities and benefit rich urban areas that already have more jobs and economic diversity.”

Opponents such as Stone praise the goals of climate-change regulations but say private-sector innovation should drive clean technology, not government mandates.

They warn that tightening California’s rules, already the nation’s toughest, will increase gas and electricity costs for companies, farmers and the poor, eliminating jobs and driving business to less-expensive states. Rural residents traveling long distances to work, school and medical care will be disproportionately hurt, they say.

Proponents says the rules could bolster California’s $2.3 trillion economy — already the world’s seventh largest — by stabilizing energy costs, creating jobs that can’t be outsourced and lowering emissions from oil refineries, automobiles, power plants and factories. Absent action, they warn, the effects of climate change — long droughts, hotter temperatures and rising seas — would overwhelm it.

The bills call for California to get at least half its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2030 and to lower carbon air pollution to 80 percent below 1990 levels within 35 years. New rules would seek to halve the petroleum Californians burn and require a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings.

The bills have passed the Senate and await hearings in the Assembly, where they also are expected to win approval. Democrats control both houses.

“The world is watching what California does,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said in an interview. “If we can prove that we can move forward with far-reaching carbon-reduction policies while at the same time reducing harmful pollutants that our children breathe into their lungs and grow the economy, then we know that the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Canadians, the Indians will follow.”

Jobs created to install solar panels or retrofit buildings for energy efficiency don’t require advanced degrees, de Leon said. Subsidized solar panels for low-income families in Fresno lower electricity bills, and more fuel-efficient hybrids in East Sacramento cost less at the pump.

That’s scant consolation to Chad Hathaway, who owns a 27-person oil-drilling operation in Kern County, about 110 miles northeast of Los Angeles. That’s where more than 70 percent of oil is drilled in California, which trails only Texas and North Dakota in production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Hathaway said the governor and his allies don’t appreciate the harm their campaign would cause Central Valley farming counties, which have been ravaged by unemployment rates as high as 11.1 percent, a four-year drought and declining oil prices that sent drilling to a record low.

“They live in a utopian society,” Hathaway said. “People who are truly struggling in the San Joaquin Valley are poor Hispanic people or poor people in general. They can’t afford to turn on the air conditioning or drive their cars.”

Manufacturers in California already pay more for electricity. In March, such users paid an average of 10.63 cents per kilowatt-hour, 57 percent higher than the national average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Past climate-change legislation in California has drawn concern even from Democrats. A June 2014 letter signed by 16 Assembly Democrats warned that an expansion of the state’s cap- and-trade program to cover transportation fuels would hurt the poor the most.

This year’s legislation is backed by a coalition of organizations including the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, companies including eBay Inc. and KB Home, and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer.

Steyer says mandates for more renewable energy will drive innovation. That will decrease costs in the long run, while the scarcity of some fossil fuels will cause prices to rise.

“The idea that the curves aren’t going to cross in 15 years is not something that I lie awake worrying about,” Steyer, founder of San Francisco-based Farallon Capital Management LLC, said in an interview. “This is going to turn out much better from an innovation standpoint than anyone understands now.”

(c)2015 Bloomberg News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Ben Amstutz via Flickr

EPA Proposes Huge Carbon Emission Cuts For Heavy Trucks

EPA Proposes Huge Carbon Emission Cuts For Heavy Trucks

By Greg Gardner, Detroit Free Press (TNS)

Federal regulators are proposing that manufacturers of medium and heavy-duty trucks reduce carbon emissions by 1 billion metric tons and cut fuel costs by about $170 billion by next decade.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration came up with the standards that will now face a period during which industry and environment groups will comment. The standards could be revised.

The agencies are asking for a cut in carbon emissions between 2021 and 2027 that would be nearly equal to the greenhouse gas emissions from all U.S. residences in one year. The fuel-efficiency targets would save more oil than what the U.S. currently imports annually from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“Once upon a time, to be pro-environment you had to be anti-big-vehicles. This rule will change that,” said U.S Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “In fact, these efficiency standards are good for the environment – and the economy. When trucks use less fuel, shipping costs go down. It’s good news all around, especially for anyone with an online shopping habit.”

The fuel economy and emission standards would cover more than 7 million tractor trailers and other types of heavy-duty trucks that haul most of the nation’s goods. These rules will require manufacturers to use new technology that could add as much as $14,000 to the cost of making a new truck, according to the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.

Mark Rosekind, NHTSA administrator, said a truck operator who bought a new rig in 2027 would recover the cost of meeting the proposed standards in about two years through fuel savings.

The standard would be defined in terms of increased freight hauled per fuel consumed, Rosekind said. The emission requirement would be set in terms of grams of carbon dioxide released per mile. Neither Rosekind nor EPA official Janet McCabe would provide a specfic target.

But the Obama administration is intent on establishing policies that will accelerate the reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas associated with contributing to climate change.

“We’re delivering big time on President Obama’s call to cut carbon pollution,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. “With emission reductions weighing in at 1 billion tons, this proposal will save consumers, businesses and truck owners money; and at the same time spur technology innovation and job-growth, while protecting Americans’ health and our environment over the long haul.”

Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles currently account for about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and oil use in the U.S. transportation sector, but only represent about 5 percent of vehicles on the road. Globally, oil consumption and greenhouse emissions from heavy-duty vehicles are expected to surpass that of passenger vehicles by 2030.

The United States is working with other major economies to encourage progress on fuel economy standards in other countries, which will improve global energy and climate security by reducing reliance on oil.

(c)2015 Detroit Free Press. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

U.S. Considers Climate Change Plan That Would Mandate Emission Cuts

U.S. Considers Climate Change Plan That Would Mandate Emission Cuts

By Neela Banerjee, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The United States is considering a proposal to combat climate change that would require countries to offer plans for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions on a certain schedule but would leave it to individual nations to determine how deep their cuts would be, said Todd Stern, the nation’s chief climate negotiator.

Speaking at Yale University on Tuesday, Stern gave the clearest indication so far of what the U.S. position will be regarding a road map toward an international agreement on greenhouse gas reductions. His comments suggested that the U.S. would back the plan, first put forth by New Zealand, when international negotiators meet in Lima, Peru, in December to try to establish parameters for an eventual agreement. Negotiators are aiming to sign that deal next year in Paris.

“If we were to conclude a new climate agreement in Paris along the lines of what I just outlined, would we have accomplished much? I think the answer is unequivocally yes,” Stern said. “We would have for the first time established a stable, durable, rules-based agreement with legal force that is more ambitious than ever before, even if not yet ambitious enough — an agreement that is applicable to all in a genuine and not just a formalistic manner.”

Despite more than 20 years of international discussions about addressing climate change, the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are higher than ever. Scientists warn that the window is closing on measures that nations could take to slow the rise in average global temperatures and avert the worst effects of global warming.

International agreements to cut emissions have historically snagged on the idea that developed countries such as the United States should do more to cut emissions than emerging nations, because developed states were the ones that pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for a century as they built their economies. But the biggest emitter is now China and India is No. 3, with the U.S. sandwiched between.

The New Zealand plan would take into account that not all countries could cut emissions by the same levels, but would mandate that all countries make some cuts. There would be a “legally binding obligation to submit a schedule and various legally binding provisions for accounting, reporting, review and periodic updates,” Stern said, so that other countries, scientists, environmentalists and the broader public could keep track of a nation’s progress.

The idea has already run into resistance, Stern acknowledged, but he argued that it would be the most viable way forward. If the international community insists that countries agree to be legally bound to cuts, many major emitters would balk, including the United States, where a gridlocked Congress has been unable to act on climate change. Further, countries would “lowball” the cuts they would make for fear of being unable to meet higher, binding goals, Stern said.

One sign of the plan’s viability might come when President Barack Obama visits China next month. The U.S. and China have been working “very closely and very intensively” on climate issues, Stern said. Chinese support for the plan could give it considerable momentum going into the Lima talks.

Photo: Mikael Miettinen via Flickr