Gov. Mark Gordon spoke with Advance Casper members Feb. 13 2024 in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Dustin Bleizeffer):
February 14, 2024
Governor Mark Gordon’s push for carbon capture at coal-fired power plants and for pumping planet-warming carbon dioxide underground to produce more oil isn’t a climate crusade, he told business leaders Tuesday in Casper. It’s an acknowledgment of where policies outside Wyoming have driven markets.
Wyoming, the nation’s top coal producer and among its top oil and natural gas producers, can help meet the goal — and the market reality — of reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere, he said. But the state doesn’t have to abandon its fossil fuels to do it.
Instead, Gordon is on a mission to prove that integrating carbon capture with fossil fuel production and use is not only economically and technically viable, it’s necessary to fill in the energy-availability gaps that renewable energy introduces into the western electricity grid when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
And if people are honest about the full cost and complete carbon life cycles of both renewables and fossil fuel energy, more states will get on board, he said.
Gov. Mark Gordon visits with Casper business leaders Feb. 13 2024 in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
“If we can extend the life of these coal plants [by retrofitting them to capture carbon] for a period of time, we can meet that gap,” Gordon told members of Advance Casper, the city’s business and economic development group.
Gordon has been aggressively sharing his energy vision of late. He spoke last fall at Harvard University, which drew a strong rebuke from Wyoming’s far right. He also appeared on “60 Minutes,” where the governor discussed making the state carbon-negative.
One challenge, Gordon explained to members of Advance Casper, is that states that are demanding low-carbon or carbon-free electricity are not fairly distributing those costs, which include the loss of viewsheds and wildlife habitat from wind and solar farms in Wyoming. At the same time, those states don’t want to help pay to capture carbon at Wyoming coal plants, despite their own carbon policies that push costs onto Wyoming ratepayers.
“We need to be able to have the grid pay for the desire to reduce carbon emissions — that’s consumers across” the West, Gordon said.
To that end, Gordon has been lobbying his counterparts in the Western Governors Association. Gordon was elected WGA president last summer, and he established “Decarbonizing the West” as his signature initiative during his one-year tenure.
A sticker at Nerd Gas Co. in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
The initiative spans an all-of-the-above energy strategy, from nuclear and geothermal power to smarter siting of wind and solar development. Bringing some of those western state leaders onboard with his ideas for adding carbon capture to fossil fuels is still a challenge, Gordon said.
Meantime, the Biden administration — although it’s onboard with Wyoming’s carbon capture research efforts — continues to present existential threats to the state’s struggling fossil fuel industries through restrictive rulemakings to cut carbon emissions, the governor maintains.
State of the state’s energy
In his State of the State address on Monday at the Capitol, Gordon said the Legislature’s task of crafting a state budget for the next two years is particularly challenging under the weight of federal policies that the Biden administration continues to pile on fossil fuels — an industry that has “anchored our economy for over a century,” Gordon said.
The weight of Wyoming’s fossil fuel economic anchor has varied greatly in recent years, and it’s the largest factor in setting the state’s budget — in boom times and in bust. Although revenue from Wyoming’s carbon-based energy industries rebounded after the economic shock of the pandemic, markets have begun to settle back into broader trends that point to a continued decline in Wyoming coal consumption and the potential for even more volatility for oil and natural gas.
Gov. Mark Gordon gives his State of the State address Feb. 12, 2024, at the Capitol in Cheyenne. (Ashton J. Hacke/WyoFile)
They also represent a federal policy agenda that is “misguided,” “warped” and “unwise” — and, borrowing from a phrase by Gulf War military leader Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, they amount to “pure, unadulterated ‘bovine scatology,’” Gordon declared.
“Wyoming people know how these policies have left our nation more vulnerable to put our economy — our very way of life — at risk,” Gordon said.
Mauna Loa is WMO Global Atmosphere Watch benchmark station and monitors rising CO2 levels Week of 23 April 2023: 424.40 parts per million Weekly value one year ago: 420.19 ppm Weekly value 10 years ago: 399.32 ppm 📷 http://CO2.Earthhttps://co2.earth/daily-co2. Credit: World Meteorological Organization
A first of its kind U.N. study by conservation scientists finds nearly half of internationally protected migratory species are on their way to extinction.
Humans are driving migratory animals—sea turtles, chimpanzees, lions and penguins, among dozens of other species—towards extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of migratory species ever carried out.
The State of the World’s Migratory Species, a first of its kind report compiled by conservation scientists under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found population decline, a precursor to extinction, in nearly half of the roughly 1,200 species listed under the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), a 1979 treaty aimed at conserving species that move across international borders.
The report’s findings dovetail with those of another authoritative U.N. assessment, the 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, that found around 1 million of Earth’s 8 million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity. Since the 1970s, global biodiversity, the variation of life on Earth, has declined by a whopping 70 percent.
Scientists and economists use complicated models to try to predict how fast the world can transition away from fossil fuels. The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 modeled pathways for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world hitting the 1.5C target without substantially overshooting or using speculative technology (like large-scale carbon capture) that doesn’t yet exist. At this point, many experts believe that the economy is too stuck on fossil fuels to transition fast enough for 1.5 degrees.
Does that mean we’ll pass catastrophic tipping points?
Arctic Ocean. Photo credit: The European Commission
That’s a more difficult question. Scientists don’t know exactly when certain tipping points — like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost — will occur. It’s very hard to predict and model these types of catastrophic changes.
And 1.5C isn’t a magic threshold; it’s not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will grind to a halt. But one thing is certain: For every tenth of a degree of warming, tipping points are more likely. Two degrees is worse than 1.9 degrees, which is worse than 1.8 degrees, and so on.
And at each tenth of a degree, the infrastructure and systems that the world has built — electric grids, homes, livelihoods — will become more strained. Our modern world simply was not designed for temperatures this high. At some level, the final temperature of the planet isn’t what matters most. It’s where countries can actually get carbon emissions to zero — and stop contributing to future warming altogether.
Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Shannon Osaka). Here’s an excerpt:
It’s official: For the past 12 months, the Earth was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in preindustrial times, scientists said Thursday [February 8, 2024], crossing a critical barrier into temperatures never experienced by human civilizations. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past 12 months clocked in at a scorching 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) higher on average compared with between 1850 and 1900. At some level, that’s not surprising — the past 12 months have been scorching, as a warm El Niño cycle combined with the signal of human-caused warming generated heat waves and extreme weather events around the globe.
“This El Nino maximum is riding on top of a base climate that is continuously warming due to climate change,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in an email. “The combination of them is what’s giving us such hot global temperatures.”
But does this mean that the world’s most famous climate goal is out of reach? Not … exactly. Here’s what you need to know:
In the 2016 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 nations agreed to keep the global average temperature from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — and to “pursue efforts” to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latter addition largely came from pressure from small-island states, who are at risk of disappearing under rising seas if temperatures get much higher. Scientists have shown that holding the temperature riseto 1.5C could mean the survival of coral reefs, the preservation of Arctic sea ice and less deadly heat waves…
Does this mean we have missed the 1.5C climate goal? No. There’s actually some disagreement about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold — but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period. Scientists estimate that without dramatic emissions reductions, that will happen sometime in the 2030s. But there could be other single years or 12-month periods that cross the line before then.
Can we still avoid passing 1.5C? Most scientists say passing 1.5C is inevitable. “The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail,” Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a call with reporters late last year.
A boom in Chinese solar power construction drove another record-breaking year of renewables growth in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Carbon Brief analysis of figures in the IEA’s Renewables 2023 report show that the world is now on track to build enough solar, wind and other renewables over the next five years to power the equivalent of the US and Canada.
Rapid growth has also pushed the IEA to once again significantly upgrade its renewables forecast, adding an extra 728 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to a five-year estimate it made just a year ago. This is more than the electricity capacity of Germany and India combined.
The agency attributes this growth to plummeting costs of solar power and favourable policy regimes, particularly in China. New solar and onshore wind now provide cheaper electricity than new fossil fuel power plants almost everywhere, it says, as well as being cheaper than most existing fossil fuel assets.
Despite such accelerated expansion, the world is not currently on track to achieve the COP28target of tripling renewables capacity by 2030, according to the IEA.
However, it proposes various measures to further increase deployment, including more finance for developing countries.
‘Step change’
Last year was a “step change for renewable power growth” as the world built an extra 507GW of renewable capacity, primarily solar and wind power, according to the IEA.
This was a 49% increase on the previous year’s construction. It marked the 22nd year in a row that renewable capacity addition reached record levels.
Over the six-year period 2023-2028, an additional 3,684GW of renewables is expected to come online under the IEA’s “main” forecast. This is double the current total of renewable capacity installed globally.
In 2023, solar power both at utility-scale and on rooftops amounted to three-quarters of capacity additions, primarily due to growth in China. Over the next five years, 73% of the 3,174GW of new capacity will be solar, again driven largely by China. (See: China leads.)
By Carbon Brief’s calculations, this 2024-2028 period is on track to see an extra 4,963 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity generation from renewable sources.
This amounts to one-sixth of the world’s electricity output in 2022. As the chart below shows, this is equivalent to covering the entire electricity demand of the US and Canada with newly-built renewables.
Electricity generation in 2022 (dark blue) from key fuel sources and countries, terawatt-hours (TWh). Red bars indicate estimated electricity generation from the renewables built in 2019-2023 and set to be built in 2024-2028, according to the IEA’s “main case” forecast. Source: Carbon Brief analysis by Simon Evans of figures from the IEA Renewables 2023 and Renewables 2022 reports, the IEA world energy outlook 2023 and the Ember data explorer.
By 2028, the IEA forecasts that renewables will account for 42% of global electricity generation, with wind and solar power making up 25%. Despite showing no growth across this period, hydropower is still expected to be the largest single source of renewable power.
Taken together, the agency says renewables will overtake coal power as the largest source of power in “early 2025”. (A year ago, the agency said renewables would become the world’s largest electricity source within three years.)
One major driver of this growth is the plummeting cost of renewables, especially solar photovoltaics (PV). Spot prices for solar modules declined by almost 50% in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to the IEA.
Last year, 96% of newly installed utility-scale solar and onshore wind capacity generated cheaper electricity than new coal and gas plants, according to the IEA.
Moreover, three-quarters of new wind and solar power plants provided cheaper power than even existing fossil-fuel facilities.
The other key driver is the strong policy support that renewables enjoy in “more than 130 countries”, the IEA says. It notes that “policies remain key for attracting investment and enabling deployment”, with roughly 87% of the utility-scale renewable growth between 2023 and 2028 “expected to be stimulated by policy schemes”.
At the same time, the report highlights the impact of the “new macroeconomic environment” on the renewables sector, with inflation and high interest rates raising costs. Offshore wind has been hardest hit, with the IEA’s forecast for its growth outside China dropping by 15%.
The report also examines renewable heat consumption and the use of biofuels. Both are set to grow considerably in the coming years, but the IEA says neither are currently on track for the trajectories seen in its net-zero scenario, which aligns with the Paris Agreement.
Record revision
As a result of this growth, the IEA has again significantly raised its forecast for renewables capacity expansion, by a record amount.
It now sees an additional 728GW being built in the 2023-2027 period compared to its forecast from 2022 – a 33% increase. This is notable considering that, last year, the agency described a five-year 424GW adjustment as its “largest ever upward revision”.
The chart below shows the 120GW divergence between actual renewables growth in 2023 – some 507GW – and the forecast for that year of 387GW, made by the IEA in 2022.
Annual additions of renewable capacity (dark blue), with forecasts from 2022 (light blue) and 2023 (dark blue). The 2023 is based on the IEA’s “main case”. Unlike in previous IEA reports, solar power data for all countries has been converted to direct current (DC), increasing capacity for countries reporting in alternating current (AC). The 2022 forecast data has been converted to allow comparison. Source: Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the IEA Renewables 2023 and Renewables 2022, and historical data from the IEA.
The IEA has a long history of making relatively conservative predictions for renewable growth that are subsequently outstripped by reality, due to a combination of more favourable policy conditions and faster-than-expected cost reductions.
Forecasts from previous IEA renewables reports issued in 2020 and 2021 showed annual renewable growth rates remaining fairly stable at around 200GW and 300GW per year for the following five years, respectively.
However, these forecasts have not been included in the chart above as, for the first time, the agency has converted all of its solar power values to direct current, resulting in slightly different GW values. This means previous forecasts are not directly comparable, although the 2022 forecast figures have been converted for this purpose.
China leads
A key conclusion from the IEA’s new report is the global dominance of China in deploying solar and other renewables, which is set to increase in the coming years.
In the period 2005-2010, China built 39% of the world’s new renewable energy capacity. This increased to 47% in the 2017-2022 period and the IEA expects it to rise to 59% between 2023 and 2028. This can be seen in the chart below.
By 2028, the agency estimates that nearly half of China’s electricity will be generated by renewables. According to Ember, as of 2022 only around 30% of China’s electricity was from renewables.
During this period, the nation is set to deploy four times more renewables than the EU and five times more than the US.
Total renewable electricity capacity growth across six-year periods, including the forecasted growth under the IEA’s “main case” for 2023-2028. Growth in China is red and growth in the rest of the world is dark blue. Source: IEA Renewables 2023.
This growth is being driven by the nation’s success in solar power manufacture and installation, according to the IEA. In “almost all provinces”, generation costs for new utility-scale solar and onshore wind are now lower than for coal, which is generally used as the benchmark for electricity prices, the agency says.
The IEA attributes this progress to policy measures, including power market reforms, green certificate systems and province-level financial support to support rooftop solar installation. It also points to a “supply glut” that has helped solar module costs “plummet drastically”.
As China accounts for 90% of the upwards revision in the IEA’s forecast out to 2028, it notes that the nation’s solar achievements actually “hide slower progress in other countries”.
There have been a number of significant supportive policy changes in other countries and regions, however.
The US and the EU are expected to see renewable installation rates double across 2023-2028, compared to the previous six-year period – in both cases due primarily to solar expansion. The IEA attributes this to the US Inflation Reduction Act and supportive national policies – such as government renewable power auctions – across European nations.
The report also highlights the success of supportive policies in India and Brazil. It notes that while renewables are set to expand rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa – particularly South Africa – the region “still underperforms considering its resource potential and electrification needs”.
Tripling renewables
At COP28, nearly every government in the world agreed to a target of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. This would bring the total to 11,000GW, which is in line with the IEA’s own net-zero scenario.
As it stands, the new report concludes that under the IEA’s “main case” forecast, shown in yellow in the chart below, renewable capacity would increase to 7,339GW in 2028.
Following that trajectory, capacity would reach around 9,000GW in 2030 – roughly an increase to 2.5 times current levels.
This forecast is based on existing policies and takes into account “country-specific challenges that hamper faster renewable energy expansion”, the IEA says.
By contrast, the IEA’s “accelerated case” involves governments “overcom[ing] these challenges and implement[ing] existing policies more quickly”.
In this scenario, shown in red below, renewables growth is around 21% higher. Capacity increases to 8,130GW in 2028, putting the world on track for the tripling by 2030 target.
Global renewables capacity growth under the “main case” (yellow) and “accelerated case” (red) forecasts laid out by the IEA. The light blue bar shows the 2022 baseline on which the “tripling renewables by 2030” target (dark blue) is based. Source: IEA Renewables 2023.
The IEA lists a handful of broad measures that governments could take to achieve an “accelerated” trajectory.
These include: improved policy responses to the “new macroeconomic environment” such as higher inflation; more investment in grid infrastructure; and dealing with “cumbersome administrative barriers and permitting procedures and social acceptance issues”.
The IEA notes that “the lack of affordable financing remains the most important challenge to renewable project development in most EMDEs [emerging markets and developing economies], especially in countries where renewable policy uncertainties also increase project risk premiums”.
It emphasises the need to boost financing for EMDEs to overcome this barrier. Last year, renewable growth was concentrated in just 10 nations and tripling renewables requires “a much faster deployment rate…in numerous other nations”, the IEA says.
A solar farm off CO 17 in Alamosa County. Photo credit: Owen Woods/Alamosa Citizen
The experts tell us an energy gap looms. Fossil fuels are phasing out, and solar and wind power can’t produce enough electricity to meet the demand in coming decades.
But that’s not the thinking of Amory Lovins, the 76-year-old co-founder of RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute in western Colorado.
A Harvard and Oxford dropout who’s been called the “Einstein of Energy Efficiency, Lovins said recently: “If we do the right things, we’ll look back and ask each other, ‘What was all the fuss about?’”
Lovins became famous in the 1970s after his research told him that building more polluting coal-fired power plants was a destructive mistake. His solution then was greater efficiency and reliance on renewables, and they, he insists, are still the answer.
“Though it’s invisible, efficiency will cut 50% of energy use and up to 80% if we do the right things,” he told me recently. “Most of the energy we use is wasted, which makes it much cheaper to save it, rather than buy it or burn it.”
According to a recent Princeton paper, he’s right: 84% of all energy consumed goes to waste during delivery or by leakage.
To prove it decades ago, he built a passive solar, super-insulated house at 7,100 feet of elevation in Old Snowmass, Colorado. It never had a heating system though winters regularly recorded 40 degrees below-zero temperatures.
When I arrived there recently at 8 a.m. it was 12 degrees F. Yet the house featured banana and papaya trees growing in natural light around a koi pond.
We became acquainted when he read my January 2023 Writers on the Range column entitled; “The energy gap nobody wants to tussle with.” I’d advocated building small modular nuclear reactors to bolster the grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
Lovins became famous in the 1970s after his research told him that building more polluting coal-fired power plants was a destructive mistake. His solution then was greater efficiency and reliance on renewables, and they, he insists, are still the answer.
“Though it’s invisible, efficiency will cut 50% of energy use and up to 80% if we do the right things,” he told me recently. “Most of the energy we use is wasted, which makes it much cheaper to save it, rather than buy it or burn it.”
According to a recent Princeton paper, he’s right: 84% of all energy consumed goes to waste during delivery or by leakage.
To prove it decades ago, he built a passive solar, super-insulated house at 7,100 feet of elevation in Old Snowmass, Colorado. It never had a heating system though winters regularly recorded 40 degrees below-zero temperatures.
When I arrived there recently at 8 a.m. it was 12 degrees F. Yet the house featured banana and papaya trees growing in natural light around a koi pond.
We became acquainted when he read my January 2023 Writers on the Range column entitled; “The energy gap nobody wants to tussle with.” I’d advocated building small modular nuclear reactors to bolster the grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Lovins called to set me straight, and after a second conversation and more research, I’m beginning to think he’s right.
Though Lovins has many solutions for the energy gap, he touts three major ways to find more energy in what we already do. Tops on the list is changing how we build and retrofit existing structures because buildings consume 75% of the electricity we buy.
Most energy jobs in the United States are already increasing efficiency, ranging from upgrading windows and other retrofits, far outpacing the shrinking fossil fuels industry. (energy.gov)
As one example, Lovins advocates “outsulation” for older structures, defined as adding exterior insulating panels to save heat. Courtesy of the European Union, my Irish in-laws recently had their house “wrapped” and saw their heating bills plummet.
His second way is demand-response, which Lovins calls flexiwatts. An example is cycling air conditioners off for 15-30 minutes at a time, a barely noticeable adjustment that cuts demand for peaker-power plants, those big emitters of greenhouse gases.
His third way is using renewables more effectively. Diversifying renewables by location and type within a region evens gaps from windless and cloudy weather.
Coyote Gulch’s shiny new Leaf May 13, 2023
As for electric cars being a drain on the grid, they will prove to be sources of electricity, he said, as the next generation batteries will be cheaper and likely have double the storage. Daytime solar stored in vehicles will be bi-directional, spooling out power during peak evening demand.
Lovins also cites LED lights dramatically cutting the cost of energy. In just a decade, they’ve become 30 times more efficient, 20 times brighter and 10 times cheaper.
Lovins is quick to admit that an energy gap remains, but he predicts a single-digit gap—6%—between what renewables produce and what’s needed. That, he said, can be made up by stored, green hydrogen or ammonia, manufactured from water and air with solar energy, and burned in existing gas plants.
As for nuclear power plants, Lovins said even the best-case scenarios for the next generation of nuclear generators are at least a decade away, and at least eight times more costly than renewables today.
“It’s better to use fast, cheap and certain rather than slow, costly and speculative,” he said.
Though cutting loose from fossil fuels is a massive undertaking, Lovins said America is on track. “We are on or ahead of schedule on renewables, with 85% of net new additions to the grid from renewables, and $1 billion invested in solar in the United States daily.”
For these reasons and more, Lovins sees our energy future as more of what we’re already doing—only smarter and faster. [ed. emphasis mine]
Let’s hope that he’s right. Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that exists to spur lively dialog about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.
Denver Water’s administration building is powered by solar panels. Photo credit: Denver Water.
When it comes to the country’s climate change culprits, the biggest offenders lurk in the transportation sector: Altogether, planes, trains and automobiles, etc., emit 28% of the nation’s greenhouse gases, plus other nasty pollutants that harm anyone who lives near highways and airports. Industrial sources — factories, cement plants, steel mills, etc. — spew nearly one-fourth of our climate-warming pollutants, while commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 13%, and agriculture contributes 10%.
Experts generally agree that the best way to reduce all these emissions is to electrify everything: Just replace petroleum-powered vehicles, natural gas-fired heaters and stoves and coal-fired cement kilns and steel furnaces with their electric analogs. After all, an electric vehicle’s tailpipe emits zero greenhouse gases or other pollutants. In fact, electric vehicles don’t even have tailpipes.
There is one nagging little detail, though: The energy producing all that electricity has to come from somewhere, generally from greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. The electric power sector is the nation’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after transportation. Electrifying everything might do little more than redistribute emissions from buildings and cars to the power grid. Unless, that is, the power grid is decarbonized, a simple — but monumental — task: The electric power sector needs to quit fossil fuels, cold turkey. And that requires massive investments in new power sources and innovation to remake the grid for a carbon-free world.
SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon Solar Dashboard, California Independent System Operator, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News
$3.5 million Funding the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority has allocated to help install rooftop solar on low-income households.
21,894 megawatt-hours Amount of electricity produced by utility-scale solar facilities in Oregon in 2015.
1.69 million megawatt-hours Amount produced in 2022.
500 megawatts Amount of battery storage on California’s grid in 2018.
8,000 megawatts Amount of battery storage on California’s grid today.
SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon Solar Dashboard, California Independent System Operator, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News
103.5% Amount of California’s total demand met by solar power on May 8, 2022, a record.
16,044 megawatts Amount of solar generation on the California grid on Sept. 6, 2023, just after noon, the all-time record so far.
1,000 Feet of irrigation canal to be covered by solar panels at a Gila River Indian Community project in Arizona.
SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon Solar Dashboard, California Independent System Operator, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News
1.05 billion tons Amount of coal burned for electricity generation in the U.S. in 2007.
469 million tons Amount burned in 2022.
7.1 trillion cubic feet Amount of natural gas burned for electricity generation in the U.S. in 2007.
12.4 trillion cubic feet Amount burned in 2022.
SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon Solar Dashboard, California Independent System Operator, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News
371.5 million metric tons Carbon dioxide emissions from burning natural gas to generate electricity in 2007.
661 million metric tons Amount emitted in 2022.
2.33 billion 2007 total emissions (natural gas and coal).
1.5 billion 2022 total emissions.
SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon Solar Dashboard, California Independent System Operator, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News
NASA announced that 2023 was the hottest year on record, according to an analysis of annual global average temperatures by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Scientists who maintain the temperature record, which begins in 1880, calculate a global temperature anomaly each year to determine how much temperatures have changed compared to temperatures from 1951–1980.
Every month from June through December 2023 came in as the hottest month on record. July ranked as the hottest month ever recorded.
But what caused 2023, especially the second half of it, to be so hot? Scientists asked themselves this same question. Here is a breakdown of primary factors that scientists considered to explain the record-breaking heat.
The long-term rise in greenhouse gases is the primary driver.
For more than 100 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil to power everything from lightbulbs and cars to factories and cities. These actions, along with changes in land use, have led to a rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases act like a blanket trapping heat around the planet. The more of them you add, the thicker that blanket becomes, further heating Earth.
Carbon Dioxide swirling around the Earth. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
In May 2023, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere peaked at 424 parts per million at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The annual peak has been steadily rising since measurements began in 1958. (Other global carbon measurement projects showed similarly high numbers.) Extending the record back even further with ice cores, carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they have been in at least 800,000 years.
“We’re going to continue to have records be broken because the baseline temperature is moving up all the time,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. “The cause of that warming trend over the last 50 to 60 years is dominated by our changes to greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide and methane.”
The return of El Niño added to the heat.
On top of the long-term global warming trend are natural variations in the climate. One of the largest sources of such year-to-year variability is the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which occurs in the tropical Pacific.
June 1 – 10, 2023. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
ENSO transitions between three phases: El Niño, La Niña, and neutral, or average. During El Niño, trade winds weaken; that is, winds that normally blow from east to west in the tropical Pacific weaken. The sea surface around the equator in the central and eastern Pacific near South America also becomes warmer (and higher) than normal. El Niño often coincides with the warmest years in the global average.
During La Niña, the opposite happens: the trade winds strengthen and the sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are cooler than normal. This can help offset some of the rising temperatures from long-term global warming.
From 2020–2022, the Pacific saw three years of La Niña conditions. Then El Niño returnedbeginning in May 2023. This El Niño has not yet been as strong as those in 2015–2016 or 1997–1998, both of which caused large global average temperature spikes. However, when you add this ocean warming to the long-term warming trend from greenhouse gases, the start of El Niño helped temperatures jump enough to create a new record for heat.
“For the most part, it’s us and El Niño,” said Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “At the end of the day, humans are heating the planet, and El Niño is dancing on our heads.”
Globally, long-term ocean warming and hotter-than-normal sea surface temperatures played a part.
Looking more broadly, the tropical Pacific wasn’t the only part of the ocean that was hotter than normal this year. The global sea surface temperature set new records in 2023, with the North Atlantic and other parts of the ocean experiencing several marine heat waves.
August 21, 2023. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
“Just like global temperatures, ocean temperatures are on the rise,” said Willis. “They have been rising for the last century or more, and they are not slowing down. If anything, they are speeding up.”
What’s behind the rise in ocean temperatures? Greenhouse gases warming the planet. Around 90 percent of the heat trapped by rising greenhouse gases is absorbed by the ocean. That means that as greenhouse gases continue to increase, so will ocean temperatures, which raises temperatures across the globe.
Aerosols are decreasing, so they are no longer slowing the rise in temperatures.
Another global trend that scientists are monitoring is a change in aerosols in the atmosphere. Aerosols are small particles in the air—such as smoke, dust, volcanic gases, sea spray, air pollution or soot—that can impact the climate. Airborne particles can either reflect sunlight, causing a slight cooling of the air, or absorb sunlight, causing a slight warming of it.
June 26, 2023. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
As governments have passed regulations to reduce air pollution and improve air quality, the abundance of aerosols has been decreasing in most areas. Many of these human-produced particles are the type that cool the climate slightly, so with less of them in the air, the result is a slight warming effect. But this contribution is quite small in comparison to the much greater warming from rising greenhouse gases.
Scientists at NASA and around the world are investigating how a reduction in aerosols from new shipping regulations potentially change how much solar energy is reflected back into space. While these changes can be notable on regional scales, the global impact is likely small, Schmidt said.
Scientists found that the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption did not substantially add to the record heat.
In January 2022, the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai undersea volcano blasted an unprecedented amount of water vapor and fine particles, or aerosols, into the stratosphere. Water vapor, a greenhouse gas, can produce a warming effect on the atmosphere, so scientists investigated the impact of the eruption on the global temperature. Sulfate aerosols from eruptions, on the other hand, have sometimes led to some global cooling events.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
A recent study found that the volcanic sulfate aerosols reflected some sunlight away from Earth’s surface, leading to a slight cooling of less than 0.1 degrees in the southern hemisphere following the eruption. Essentially, the warming that occurred from the increase in water vapor in the stratosphere was offset by the cooling caused by volcanic sulfate aerosols leading to a slight cooling lower in the atmosphere. This means the eruption likely did not add to the record heat in 2023.
“We are very interested in the weather and extremes of any particular year because those are the things that impact us,” said Schmidt. “But the key difference between this decade and the ones before is that the temperatures keep rising because of our activities, principally the burning of fossil fuels.”
Perhaps you’ve seen the latest viral Facebook meme about the ungodly amount of mined material needed to manufacture an electric vehicle. If not, you’ve probably seen one like it, maybe bashing EVs, maybe solar panels or wind turbines or some other clean energy technology (often accompanied by a gory image of a purported lithium mine). The implication is always the same: That “green” technology you’re so fired up about isn’t green at all — in fact, it’s destroying the earth.
Normally I wouldn’t give these things a second thought. After all, they are memes, which by their very nature are simplistic and aimed at triggering the most primal emotional response, usually some flavor of fear.
But this particular one — an inventory of the many tons of ore that must be mined to produce the materials in a Tesla model Y battery — has been especially infectious, it seems, and has made its way onto many of my social media pals’ feeds. Some of my friends have used it to argue against purchasing an EV, others have rightly questioned its veracity, while still others have posted counter-memes debunking it.
Since the Land Desk covers lithium mining and other impacts of the clean energy transition, I figured I’d use this meme — circulated by someone named Jackie — as an opportunity to add some context. That’s because, regardless of whether the meme is accurate or not, it does bring up an important question: Are electric vehicles merely an instance of problem shifting, or transferring the equivalent environmental impacts from one technology to another?
The post in question, let’s call it Jackie’s Meme, claims that 250 tons of earth must be moved to obtain the lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt in a typical EV battery, and a Caterpillar 994A used for this purpose would burn about 264 gallons of diesel in 12 hours, offsetting the carbon emissions reductions you’d get from driving the car.
These are certainly eye-opening numbers, even if they are a bit off (I came up with a figure of 69 tons of material moved, not 250, but more on that later). But they are also irrelevant in isolation, since the only thing we can conclude is that manufacturing an EV requires mining, just like mining was required to produce the laptop I’m writing this on, the desk it’s sitting atop, and the data center responsible for delivering the information to you. In other words, building an EV has an impact on the environment, maybe even a big one.
Coyote Gulch’s shiny new Leaf May 13, 2023
But you don’t buy an EV because it’s good for the environment. You buy it because it’s less bad for the environment than a conventional vehicle (and for other reasons, such as performance, fuel savings, and so forth). Without including a comparison of how much material and mining is needed for a conventional vehicle vs. an electric one, the meme is useless, meant only to scare people away from doing anything.
And that may have been the intent. But another reason for the omission is that accurate apples to apples comparisons of the total amount of mined material needed for an average ICE vehicle vs. an average EV are hard to find. That said, we do know that EVs generally are heavier than their gas-powered counterparts due to the large, dense batteries (although they have far fewer moving parts). And we do know that EVs require far more of certain minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper.
This IEA graphic is a good one for those particular minerals:
Source: International Energy Agency
Manufacturing an electric vehicle, then, requires about six times as much of the listed materials as a conventional car. I suspect this disparity might shrink somewhat if steel (iron), aluminum, and molybdenum were also included, but it wouldn’t change the basic fact: EVs are more mineral intensive than ICE cars.
And whether the mineral is steel or nickel, cobalt or platinum, extracting it requires moving, hauling, milling, and smelting huge amounts of rock to get a relatively minuscule amount of target mineral. That’s why the Bingham Copper Mine near Salt Lake City is 2.5 miles wide and nearly 4,000 feet deep. And the more rock and ore you mine, the larger the volume of waste, or tailings and waste rock and, generally speaking, the greater the environmental impact1. Here’s a great graphic showing the ratio of total material moved to ore mined to commodity produced:
From the Energy Transitions Commission. Hat-tip to Hannah Ritchie’s excellent Sustainability by the Numbers newsletter for pointing me to this resource.
Jackie apparently used this sort of math to get to the 250-tons figure. I think she’s off: using the IEA figures and the above graphic, I find that an EV would actually require moving about 69 tons of earth. But when you’re talking dozens of tons, it doesn’t really matter that much. Jackie’s point still stands: You’ve gotta mine a lot of stuff to make an EV.
So, go ahead, buy that gasoline guzzler and feel good about it. You’re doing the planet a favor!
Just kidding.
Sure, maybe when they come out the factory door, a new EV has a larger environmental footprint than its gasoline-powered counterpart. But once you start driving the things, the gasoline car’s impact grows at a much faster rate than the EV’s because of, well, gasoline.
Let’s say you live in New Mexico, and drive your car about 14,400 miles per year (the average for the state per registered vehicle), and you have an average car that gets about 22 miles per gallon. You’ll burn through 654 gallons of gasoline and your tailpipe will spew out about 6.4 tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide each year, along with a nasty cocktail of health-harming and smog-forming pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, benzene, and particulates.
That’s on top of the impacts of drilling for the oil from which the gasoline is derived. Drilling and hydraulic fracturing a single well can use 10 million gallons or more of fresh water. The 1,300 gallons of crude oil needed to produce your car’s annual gasoline use will be accompanied by as much as 7,800 gallons of briney, contaminated wastewater that must be disposed of — often in deep injection wells that can trigger earthquakes. Planet-warming methane, along with harmful volatile organic compounds, can spew from oil wells, pipelines, and refineries. Pipelines rupture regularly, spilling wastewater, oil, or diesel — sometimes they even explode. And petroleum refineries are major pollution sources as well.
Electric vehicles don’t have tailpipes, so you’re not polluting the neighborhood by driving one around2. Yes, electric vehicles must be charged, and yes, some of that electricity is likely to be generated by burning fossil fuels, which requires extraction and creates pollution and other environmental impacts. But EVs generally are more efficient than gasoline powered cars, especially the gargantuan SUVs Americans are so enamored with, so even if you charge on a natural gas-generation-dominated grid you’re likely emitting less carbon per mile. Study after cradle-to-grave study has found that EVs have lower emissions over their lifecycle than their gasoline-powered counterparts, even when battery production3 and raw material mining is accounted for.
This is a Euro-centric graph from Carbon Brief, but it gets the point across. And believe me, an average “Euro car” is likely far more efficient than an average U.S. conventional car. Source: Carbon Brief.
EVs’ environmental advantages will continue to build as the electricity grid is further decarbonized and fossil fuel generation is displaced by solar, wind, geothermal, small hydropower, and nuclear. Large-scale battery recycling efforts are ramping up, which will reduce the amount of mining needed to build the things, and battery technology is advancing: They are becoming more energy dense and new lithium-, cobalt-, and nickel-free batteries are being developed. Researchers and startups are working to extract lithium from geothermal brine, allowing them to generate electricity and produce battery materials in one shot. And some hardrock mining operations are electrifying their haul trucks and other equipment and building solar arrays to power operations.
The upshot: If you need to purchase a new vehicle, and you’re trying to choose between an electric one or a gasoline-powered one, the EV probably would be a better choice for the environment over the long haul — regardless of the scare-memes.
Still, even that meme serves a purpose: It reminds us that we won’t get out of this mess by producing and consuming more stuff, no matter how “green” it may be. [ed. emphasis mine] Simply clogging up the roads with electric vehicles, blanketing the deserts with solar panels, building new dams, or filling our homes with “sustainable” goods won’t solve the problems created in the first place by overconsumption and waste. Economic and cultural systems must be overhauled or even overthrown. And the incessant hunger for more, more, more must be tempered at last.
Existing green growth policies are leading nowhere fast, so scientists say it’s worth exploring alternatives like degrowth to stay within planetary boundaries.
With Earth’s average annual temperature speeding toward 1.5 degrees Celsius faster than expected and global climate policy on a treadmill, an increasing number of researchers say it’s time to consider a “restorative pathway” to avoid the worst ecological and social outcomes of global warming.
In a study published today in Environmental Research Letters, an international team of scientists wrote that reaching global goals could require focusing on ways to drive rapid changes in the way people live, move, work and eat; on making sure that global wealth is distributed more equitably; and on restoring and protecting biodiversity and ecosystems like forests, oceans, fields and rivers that are critical to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The restorative approach should be considered soon because the pace of climate impacts to ecosystems and communities is speeding up, the authors said. Climate extremes are outpacing decades of efforts to cap global warming with tools like carbon trading and offsets. Those are hallmarks of the green growth path mapped out by various United Nations-sponsored climate pacts like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, as well other ancillary agreements. They all aim to keep growing the global economy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050—partly based on assuming that large quantities of carbon dioxide will be directly removed from the air and stored by giant machines by then.
Many countries, like France, Sweden and the United States, have reduced emissions while continuing to grow their economies—called decoupling—over the last few decades, but research shows it’s not happening nearly fast enough to cap global warming.
Total global emissions, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and the global average temperature all climbed to record highs during the past 30 years, amounting to about half the total greenhouse gas accumulations in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age.
“It’s almost too late. We need to get cracking with this,” said Manfred Lenzen, a sustainability researcher at the University of Sydney and co-author of the new paper. “A lot of people think 1.5 is dead already, that we have to realistically aim for staying below 2C,” he said, adding that green growth—decoupling emissions from economic expansion—might have worked if the world had taken it seriously in 2000.
Starting then, it would have taken only a 2 percent annual reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to reach net zero by 2050; starting now means cutting global emissions by 7 percent a year, but the green growth approach is not cutting emissions by anywhere near the required rate, he said. And, particularly as outlined in the policy guiding reports from International Panel on Climate Change, it relies on deployment of unproven technologies.
A future of carbon removal? Credit: Inside Climate News
Carbon-removal technology, for example, is still decades away from deployment at a scale that would match the IPCC’s pathways to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, as per the Paris Climate Agreement, said Lenzen.
Lenzen also co-authored a 2021 paper describing a “degrowth” alternative to the existing IPCC options, based on the idea of shrinking economies in rich countries in a controlled way by reducing production and consumption, in order to protect natural resources and reduce environmental damage while improving well-being.
Degrowth Research is Going Mainstream
A 2023 study in The Lancet Planetary Health journal showed that, even in countries with falling emissions and growing economies, emissions are not declining at rates compliant with the Paris Agreement. At the current rates, it would take those countries on average more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95 percent, the goal targeted for 2050.
The authors of that study wrote that those decoupling rates in high-income countries “cannot legitimately be considered green … To achieve Paris-compliant emission reductions, high-income countries will need to pursue post-growth demand-reduction strategies, reorienting the economy towards sufficiency, equity, and human wellbeing, while also accelerating technological change and efficiency improvements.”
Another 2023 paper in Nature described widespread scientific skepticism, especially in high-income countries, about the existing strain of tech-driven green growth, and also called for exploring “post-growth perspectives, including [growth-neutral] and degrowth strategies, to cultivate a more comprehensive discourse on sustainable development strategies.”
In any case, Lenzen added, “We’re not giving technology the chance to catch up with consumption, and that has been the dynamics over the past decade,” he said, describing a decades-long trend that is now leading researchers to look at alternative economics built on ecological sustainability and social justice.
The new paper doesn’t specifically use the term “degrowth,” but shares common themes, like focusing on human wellbeing and reduction of inequality. That “opens the possibility of talking about alternative sustainability scenarios without being too provocative about it,” said Lorenz Keyßer, a degrowth researcher at the University of Lausanne. That could make it more palatable to a wider audience, he added, including to the community of scientists who build the complex climate models that integrate human behavior with climate physics.
“Compared to their pathway, I think degrowth thinking is more explicit in terms of the proposed changes,” he said. “And it’s more openly ‘radical’ in the sense of being more pessimistic about green growth and decoupling, and in favor of a more transformative approach, which also includes ruptures and conflict.”
But research on degrowth, and similar related concepts like circular economies, or donut economics, is growing, and the European Parliament last year tasked its research service to study “beyond growth” alternatives, including a hard look to determine whether the European Union Green Deal is really sustainable.
Developing country leaders also recently spelled out steps that could have a huge cumulative impact and help protect vulnerable countries from climate impacts.
Speaking at COP28 in the context of global equity in climate financing, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said a global financial services tax of 0.1 percent could raise $420 billion, and a 5 percent tax on oil and gas profits would raise another $200 billion, while a 1 percent tax on the value of shipping would raise $70 billion.
And there would have to be some new global compact that “allows countries to recognize that they cannot only act in their own deliberate interest, but they have to also act in the interest of the preservation of global public goods,” Mottley said.
“We happen to be talking about climate,” she added. “But we could easily be talking about pandemics and big pharma. We could easily be talking about the digital divide and big tech.”
“Radical Incrementalism”
Oregon State University ecologist William Ripple, co-author of the new paper, said the findings show that their restorative pathway should be included in climate models along with the five “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or SSPs, that are used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Current emissions trends, societal denial and lack of political will make their scenario a tough sell, but he said its merits can’t be honestly debated if it’s not included as an option for policy makers.
Their findings suggest a path of “radical incrementalism,” with small short-term steps to achieve big changes, like reducing the need to mine for metals or log forests to levels that don’t threaten biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, with per capita GDP stabilizing over time.
Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
“Ending fossil fuel subsidies and public lands fossil fuel extraction projects would be great first steps for the U.S. and other developed countries, where applicable,” he said. “These actions would be low-hanging fruit and a good start in the process of radical incrementalism.”
Directly phasing out fossil fuel use is also critical, Ripple added. “An important step in this direction would be the adoption of a global coal elimination treaty since the coal industry has extremely harmful impacts on the climate and human health.”
For the paper, the team compiled a 500-year dataset for several key global climate indicators to measure humanity’s consumption of resources over the period.
“The results show a great acceleration of resource use and impacts since about 1850,” he said. “This illustrates that climate change is a symptom of the broader problem of ecological overshoot, the overexploitation of the Earth, which is driving several environmental crises.” The restorative pathway was designed to tackle this underlying issue, he added.
*As our current predicament makes clear, business-as-usual isn’t working and continued economic growth in wealthy countries isn’t sustainable,” Ripple said. “This motivated us to call for a shift toward post-growth economics where quality of life and societal wellbeing are the main priority.”
The key to curbing ecological overshoot means greatly reducing overconsumption and waste, especially by the wealthy, and implementing ecological economics that would focus on social justice rather than continued growth, he said.
One of the global measures they used dating back to 1820 shows the top 10 percent of the world’s wealthiest have consistently received at least 50 percent of all income, illustrating global economic inequality over the long term.
“The magnitude of this inequality,” he said, “provides further evidence that we need a dramatic change. We face multiple serious and interrelated social and environmental crises. We need economic policies that guide humanity toward more equitable resource use patterns.”
Under skies made hazy by wildfire smoke, flows in the Crystal River near Carbondale dipped to around 8 cfs in 2018. A new report on climate change in Colorado projects more frequent and intense wildfires and reduced streamflows in the future. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Scientists predict with high confidence that Colorado’s future spring runoff will come earlier; soil moisture will be lower; heat waves, droughts and wildfires will be more frequent and intense; and a thirstier atmosphere will continue to rob rivers of their flows — changes that are all driven by higher temperatures caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
These findings are according to the third Climate Change in Colorado Assessment report, produced by scientists at the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University and released Monday. Commissioned by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the report’s findings have implications for the state’s water managers. Borrowing a phrase from climate scientist Brad Udall, climate change is water change — which has become a common maxim for those water managers.
The report focuses on 2050 as a planning horizon and projects what conditions will be like at that time. According to the report, by 2050, the statewide annual temperatures are projected to warm by 2.5 to 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit compared with a late-20th-century baseline and 1 to 4 degrees compared with today. Colorado temperatures have already risen by 2.3 degrees since 1980. By 2050, the average year is likely to be as warm as the hottest years on record through 2022.
This warming, which scientists are very confident will come to pass, will drive the other water system changes that Colorado can expect to see. As temperatures rise and streamflows decline, water supply will decrease.
According to the report, by 2050 there will be an annual reduction of 5-30% in streamflow volume; a 5-30% reduction of April 1 snow-water equivalent (a measure of how much water is in the snowpack) and an 8-17% increase in evaporative demand (a measure of how “thirsty” the atmosphere is). A hotter, drier atmosphere can fuel dry soils and wildfire risk. Peak snowpack, which usually occurs in April, is also predicted to shift earlier by a few days to several weeks.
“Streamflows are primarily driven by snowpack that melts in the spring,” said Becky Bolinger, CSU research scientist, assistant state climatologist and lead author of the report. “When you are warming your temperatures, you are first changing the timing of when that snowpack will melt. And because we’re losing more to the atmosphere, that means we have less to run off in our rivers and be available for us later.”
Scientists are less certain about whether precipitation will increase or decrease in the future. Dry conditions have persisted across the state over the past two decades, with four of the five driest years occurring since 2000. Most climate models project an increase in winter precipitation, but they suggest the potential for large decreases in summer precipitation. But even if precipitation stays the same, streamflows will dwindle because of increased temperatures.
This graph shows the projected monthly streamflows for the Colorado River at Dotsero for 2050. A report on climate change in Colorado projects a 5-30% reduction in annual streamflow volume by 2050.
Planning for less water
CWCB officials hope water managers across the state will use the report to help plan for a future with less water. Many entities have already shifted to developing programs that support climate adaptation and resilience.
“I think we can say with confidence that it is more likely that we will have water shortages in the future,” said Emily Adid, CWCB senior climate adaptation specialist. “I think this report is evidence of that and can help local planners and people on the ground plan for those reductions in streamflow.”
Denver Water is one of those water providers that will use the report’s findings in its planning. The utility, which is the oldest and largest in the state, provides water to 1.5 million people and helped to fund the report. Denver Water has been preparing for a future with a less-reliable water supply through conservation and efficiency measures, reservoir expansion projects and wildfire mitigation.
“Projected future streamflows is a huge challenge for the water resources industry,” said Taylor Winchell, Denver Water’s senior planner and climate adaptation specialist. “The same amount of precipitation in the future means less steamflow because temperatures will continue to warm. … All this leads to this concept of uncertainty. We really need to plan for a variety of ways the future can happen essentially.”
Another finding of the report is that temperatures have warmed more in the fall than other seasons, with a 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit increase statewide since 1980, a trend that is expected to continue. Although it’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause of fall warming, Bolinger said it may have to do with the summer monsoons pattern, which can bring moisture with near-daily thunderstorms, but which have been weaker in recent years. That precipitation is critical, she said.
“First, you’re keeping the temperatures from getting too hot because you’re clouding over and getting storms,” Bolinger said. “And generally, with higher humidity, you’re going to have less evaporative loss from the soil. What we’ve been seeing in recent years is that we’re not getting that moisture in the late summer and into the fall.”
Less moisture and higher temperatures in the fall also leads to lower soil moisture and kicks off a vicious cycle of decreased water supplies. The dry soil gets locked in under the winter’s snowpack, and when spring melting begins, the water must first replenish the soils before feeding rivers and streams. This is what occurred in the upper Colorado River basin in 2021 when a near-normal snowpack translated to just 31% of normal runoff and the second-worst inflow ever into Lake Powell.
Some water-use sectors already experience shortages, especially those with junior water rights. Initiatives set up to support the environment and recreation are also at risk with shortages. And those shortages are likely to get worse in the future. In addition to grant programs, one of the ways CWCB aims to help these water users adapt is with a future avoided cost explorer (FACE) tool, which is outlined in the 2023 Water Plan. This modeling tool can help water managers figure out the costs of addressing — or failing to address — hazards such as wildfires, droughts and floods.
According to the report, extreme climate-driven events such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires are expected to be more frequent and intense.
“That gives you a little bit of perspective to say, ‘Well, what if I invest to mitigate this now, how can I lessen the potential impact in the future?,’” said Russ Sands, chief of CWCB’s water supply planning section. “I’m not trying to scare people; what we’re trying to do is motivate change and help them invest early.”
Despite the near-certainty of continued warming and resulting changes to the water system, Bolinger said there is a bright spot. Since the last time that a Climate Change in Colorado report was issued, in 2014, the world has begun to take action on reducing fossil fuel use and has shifted away from the worst-case scenario. Earlier projections were based on a “business as usual” assumption, with no climate mitigation.
“We do have things that have been put into place internationally like the Paris Accord,” Bolinger said. “We are more along the lines of a middle-case scenario. As long as we continue to take the actions that have been planned out, we are going to follow that middle scenario, which does show warming, but it’s not as bad.”
I was planning for this post to be tip-toeing into a conversation about the prior appropriation doctrine, a conversation which we badly need to have throughout the interior West, but which will likely be vigorously, even violently, opposed by those holding senior water rights in every western watershed.
But instead of that – I’ve been captured by the season, the dark season of long nights and short days that has made us – all the way back to our distant ancestors living in stick-and-mud wickiups (maybe especially them) – want to take a break from the daily round, and instead contemplate the larger problem of helping the sun return. So – a short break here, from worrying about the water we don’t have, or about 2026 and a new set of bandaids and splints for dragging into the future the Marley’s Chain that we call the Law of the River. No big bonfire either, or Saturnalia or Christmas or Kwanzaa just yet, although each in its good time. Instead, just a celebration, or at least acknowledgement, of our currently fading sun – and a revisit to the relationship between the sun and the water that the sun giveth and taketh away, the two things without which we would not be here.
A study by MIT researchers confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range. Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT; NASA
Think, for starters, of the planet misnamed ‘Earth,’ held by the mysterious force of gravity in an uneven circle around the sun at about 66,000 miles per hour, too fast for gravity’s centripetal force to pull it into the sun, but not so fast that centrifugal force would let it leave the sun’s’pull on a straight line into the black night of space – a delicate kind of dynamic balance.
But – ‘Earth’: had we seen it first from above like we can now, from satellites on the upper edge of our atmosphere, we would have called the planet ‘Water,’ or maybe more romantically, ‘Oceania.’ Water covers 70 percent of the planet; we are a planet awash in water. Where the water came from, we can only hypothesize; but we have it – and we are also just the right distance from the sun we circle so that a lot of our water is in its liquid form. A few million miles closer to the sun and our water would be vapor in the atmosphere, as on Venus; a few million miles farther away, and the oceans and land would lie under deep layers of ice – the recent Pleistocene writ larger. But we are in the ‘sweet spot’ between those extremes, where the tilt of the planet is such that in our year’s passage around the sun, most of us are getting a taste of both the water-as-ice world and the water-as-vapor world, winter and summer; but thanks be, water-as-liquid continues to be where, or what, most of the water is.
Diagram credit: USGS
The majority of that water, of course – 97 percent of it – is too salty for land-based life on the 30 percent of the planet currently not underwater. We know that the presence of any water at all on that 30 percent of the planet depends on the sun turning water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor – in effect, ‘desalinating’ it – then wafting some of that cleansed water-as-vapor over the land on winds also generated by the sun, where the water-as-vapor cools as it rises over the land and condenses as precipitation – water-as-ice or water-as-liquid, but either way, what we call ‘freshwater,’ and need more than any other single resource (with the possible exception of the sun).
More than two-thirds of the freshwater that falls over the land gets ‘banked’ on the planet’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets, mostly useless to life. A majority of the remaining third (of just 3 percent of the total water, remember) soaks in as groundwater, some of it ‘tributary’ (eventually working its way underground into streams), and the rest non-tributary (going into ‘deep-storage’ in aquifers). The top layer of water that soaks into the ground is what most of our land-based plants depend on for life and living.
The diminished remainder – less than one percent of all the water on the planet – is surface water: the rivers, streams and lakes we see, use, play in and generally love to death. This is the water that most of the animal life on earth, including us mammals, depend on for life and living. We human mammals, however, have learned how to pump groundwater up to the surface for animal uses.
Sunset over the Yampa River Valley August 25, 2016.
But this is the point at which the sun ceases to be just a good friend. Its propensity for turning water-as-liquid into water-as-vapor does not stop at the edge of the ocean, and as soon as the sun and its agent winds deliver the precipitation to us – mostly water-as-ice in the Colorado River’s mountains – it goes to work converting it back to water-as-vapor.
Western Water Assessment/Nature Conservancy/USDA Snowtography guide cover January 2022.
The sun and wind don’t even wait till the water-as-ice turns to water-as-liquid; the wind goes to work as soon as the snow lands, the sun as soon as the clouds disperse; both sun and wind begin turning an unknown quantity of the water-as-ice directly into water-as-vapor, through the process of sublimation. Only snow that falls on the lee and shaded side of rocks, trees or ridges, or falls through a forest to the ground, is safe from the sun and wind. If it is intercepted on the branches of forest trees, it is sublimated from there too. Estimates of the amount of a snowpack lost to sublimation on exposed areas range as high as 30 percent. Researchers on a large Department of Energy project are making a very complex and instrument-intensive effort to determine more accurately how much is lost to sublimation, and studies are going on in the Western forests to see if there are management strategies that would better protect the snow from sublimation.
The snowpack that survives the winter melts in the spring and early summer, water-as-liquid that either soaks into the ground or runs off in streams, both processes in which its meets other sets of challenges from the sun. The sun that soaks into the ground is eagerly sought out by the roots of plants, and is carried up into their stems, leaves and flowers. There, around 5-10 percent goes into the growth of the plants, and most of the rest is transpired through leaves into the atmosphere as vapor, partly to create a favorable micro-environment around the plant, and – one irrationally suspects – patly because that’s what their lord and master sun wants them to do. (False fact alert.)
The water that runs off, either because the slope is too steep or rocky to soak in or because the ground is already saturated, encounters other challenges. Bouncing down the mountainsides in whitewater streams, dry air catches and vaporizes tiny droplets. Then once the water-as-liquid calms down in the valleys, it encounters lots of users, including us. Much of it is captured by plants, some ‘wild,’ some domesticated, with a large portion of that being transpired back to the atmosphere. Anywhere it is exposed to the sun, some of it is evaporated. In the Colorado River Basin, the water-as-liquid eventually encounters a dam and reservoir, where it becomes a sitting duck for the sun. The hotter the reservoir’s environment, the more is lost – although reservoirs in the upper reaches of the river are only partially exempted from evaporation; they lose water-as-liquid into thinner dry air. Again, we don’t have an accurate measure of evaporation from the sun and its sidekick winds, but estimates I’ve seen are around 800,000 acre-feet in ‘system losses’ (mostly evaporation) from the states above the canyons, and 1.2 million acre-feet system losses from the states below the canyons. Nearly a sixth of the river as it has been running the past 20 years – and those numbers get a little worse in dry years of low precipitation.
Low soil moisture can soak up snow runoff, leaving less for rivers and reservoirs. Image credit: Denver Water.
So the sun giveth and the sun taketh away. A 2022 summary study of Colorado River science cites findings that only 10 percent of the precipitation that falls over the Colorado River Basin actually shows up in the river. A goodly portion of the rest undoubtedly goes to groundwater – but a recent US Geological Survey study (too complex in its science for me to really comprehend) shows that roughly half of the river’s water below the snowpack zone (roughly 8,000 feet elevation and above) is groundwater making its way into the stream. Since about 85 percent of the river’s water originates above the 8,000 foot elevation, the sun clearly does quite a lot of its taking-away before the streams ever emerge in what could be called the human-use region.
There is, however, another co-conspirator with the sun, in determining the ratio of water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor, and that is the planet’s atmosphere – what is in the atmosphere. The atmosphere has a regulatory function for the ratios of water-as-ice to water-as-liquid, and water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor. Small changes in the amount of carbon and nitrogen gases in the atmosphere change those ratios significantly. At the height of the Pleistocene Epoch (most of the past two million years plus) the quantity of carbon gases in the atmosphere had dropped to less than 200 parts per million (ppm), decreasing the capacity of the atmosphere to hold solar heat, and the precipitation that fell as snow and piled up in glaciers in the mountains and ice sheets on the leveler land – ice masses with a weight sufficient to crack and depress the continental crust, leaving depressions that filled up with the Great Lakes when the ice melted.
Sometime in the last half-million years or so, however, something caused the carbon gases in the atmosphere to begin slowly increasing, and the balance of water on earth began to shift back from the cold dry epoch of water-as-ice toward water-as-liquid. Perhaps volcanic activity, perhaps fires in forests dried out for want of water, maybe some assistance from paleo-people burning forests and grasslands to keep forage optimal for the animals they hunted – some combination of factors and events bumped up the carbon gases in the atmosphere to 300 ppm plus or minus, and the planetary climate grew warmer and wetter, mellowing into the Holocene Epoch these past 10,000-15,000 years.
So comparatively mellow was the Holocene, with water-as-liquid replacing water-as-ice in comparative abundance, that all the forms of life that had survived the Pleistocene thrived – thrived so well that many species, plant and animal, experienced episodes of the ‘trauma of success’: outgrowing their resource base in episodes of swarming, and ultimately being brought back into balance through rough action by the rest of their environments, by ‘nature’ – a menu of measures that includes pandemic disease, famine, infighting, social breakdown, and all the other consequences of too many individuals competing for too little food, water, and ‘elbow room.’
We are certainly in that category of swarming species, but are a unique case, being not locked into instinctual behavior, but either blessed or cursed with the capacity to see what’s going on and take steps to adapt culturally, thus avoiding (or at least deferring) the depredations of famine, pandemic disease and war over food, water and land. But our adaptations get ever more complex and difficult to maintain, and usually have unforeseen consequences that have to be dealt with through even more complexity.
Our current success in staying ahead of the disasters that usually brings swarming species back into balance quickly, if brutally, has depended heavily on releasing carbon substances long sequestered in the ground, burning them – and consequently driving up the capacity of the atmosphere to hold the sun’s heat. The good news there is that we’ve probably precluded the usual interstadial return to the Pleistocene winter. But the bad news is that we have begun to significantly increase the conversion of water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor. We’ve all seen the summer virga, when falling precipitation over a desert is evaporated by rising heat before it can get to the ground – beautiful in the desert, but not something we want to see everywhere and all the time….
But time next year for all that. Wishing you all a meaningful and (if it’s not contradictory) joyful holiday season. See you again in 2024 – when we’ll again go down by the river and all its problems (for which a good primer would be to look at the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa).
Click the link to read the article on the Carbon Brief website (Multiple Authors):
Nearly every country in the world has agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” – the main driver of climate change – at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
It is the first time such an agreement has been reached in 28 years of international climate negotiations.
The commitment is included in the first “global stocktake” of how countries can accelerate action to meet the goals of the landmark Paris Agreement.
However, many countries walked away from the talks frustrated at the lack of a clear call for a fossil-fuel “phase-out” this decade – and at a “litany of loopholes” in the text that might enable the production and consumption of coal, oil and gas to continue.
Despite an early breakthrough on launching a fund to pay for “loss and damage” from climate change, developing countries were left disappointed by a lack of new financial commitments for transitioning away from fossil fuels and adapting to climate impacts.
COP28 president and oil executive Dr Sultan Al Jaber hailed the “world-first” achievement of getting “fossil fuels” in a UN climate change agreement.
However, his presidency was overshadowed by allegations the UAE intended to use COP28 to make oil-and-gas deals.
Away from the negotiations, COP28 brought a wave of new international pledges – covering everything from oil-and-gas company emissions and tripling renewables, through to food systems and how the world can better integrate action on climate change and biodiversity loss.
Here, Carbon Brief provides in-depth analysis of all the key outcomes in Dubai – both inside and outside the COP.
It is yet another example of extremely vague and watered down texts full of loopholes that in no way is even close to being sufficient for staying within the 1,5° limit and ensure climate justice.
For the first time ever, COP28 ended with a deal to transition the world away from fossil fuels, Bloomberg reports. It says the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president Sultan Al Jaber arrived at a deal “strong enough for the US and EU on the need to dramatically curb fossil fuel use while keeping Saudi Arabia and other oil producers on board”. It notes that Al Jaber brought the gavel down on the so-called “global stocktake” text on Wednesday morning – a day later than when COP28 was scheduled to conclude – and was greeted by applause and cheers by delegates. The draft text of the global stocktake deal, which was published early this morning, “calls on parties to contribute to the following global efforts”, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net-zero by 2050”, Le Monde reports. It notes that the text does not include a request to “phase out” fossil fuels as many countries and civil society groups hoped for. According to the Press Association, the agreement “defied the expectations of many observers who thought that the host country being a major oil exporter would be too much of a conflict of interest”. The Guardian notes that “climate-justice advocates said the text fell far short of what was needed for a fair transition”. The New York Times lists some of the text’s other commitments, including calling on nations to triple the amount of renewable energy installed around the world by 2030 and to slash emissions of methane. The Guardianand BBC News have both been live-blogging the latest reaction to the final text before and after it was agreed.
Coverage from yesterday – published prior to the emergence of the new text – details how, as BusinessGreen describes it, the presidency and negotiating delegations had reportedly been up until 4am “attempting to broker a compromise on the global stocktake text”. The i newspaper says both the US and the UK had been branded “hypocrites” by climate campaigners for “criticising countries that do not agree to a ‘phase out’ of fossil fuels while continuing to develop oil and gas fields domestically”. The Financial Times frames the disputes that had been taking place as “the majority of countries present clash[ing] with Saudi Arabia”.
In wider COP28 news, the Independent has a piece about Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, and her effort to secure a more ambitious outcome for her country. The Guardian has an explainer detailing the importance of “means of implementation” – climate finance and other support measures – for developing countries. New Scientist has a piece about how COP28 has “changed the conversation” around fossil fuels.
Directional drilling from one well site via the National Science Foundation
Small island states that arrived after the document was approved, don’t accept the outcome as a consensus decision.
December 13, 2023
Going into overtime under the cover of a dark winter night in Dubai, climate negotiators at COP28 cooked up a weak sauce of climate half-measures that fail to adequately address the existential risk of global warming to millions of people around the globe, according to leading climate experts at the conference.
The UAE Consensus, COP28 president Sultan al-Jaber said, represents a clear step in a just transition away from fossil fuels, but the tarnished image of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and its process requiring consensus among nations, took another big hit because 39 small island states most affected by global warming were not in the room when al-Jaber signaled acceptance during the closing plenary.
As a result, there will be an asterisk next to COP28 in the future. To activists and many country delegates, the way the outcome came about further undermined al-Jaber’s leadership, which had been questioned since it was announced last year due to his apparent conflict of interest as head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, one of the biggest fossil fuel producers in the world.
The conference started Nov. 30 with a growing coalition of countries calling for a fossil fuel phase out, and earlier drafts of the decision documents all included some iteration of that language, raising hopes that the UNFCCC would face the heart of the problem head-on.
But the finalized text calls only for accelerating efforts to “phase down” the use of unabated coal power, to “[transition] away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner,” and to accelerate action toward that transition “in this critical decade.”
Some of the speakers at the closing plenary, including Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, said the mere mention of moving away from fossil fuels could be interpreted as a successful outcome for the climate summit. Al-Jaber tooted his own horn during the closing plenary by saying, “We have delivered a robust action plan to keep 1.5 in reach.”
That reference to the Paris accord’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels elicited an immediate response from some climate scientists, including Rob Larter, a polar researcher with the British Antarctic Survey.
“When you see statements like this you know you’re being lied to,” Larter wrote in a social media post. “What’s been agreed certainly does not keep 1.5C in reach.”
Larter was one of the first scientists to highlight the abrupt and alarming decline of Antarctic sea ice this year. The vast expanses of ice at the poles function as one of the planet’s main cooling systems by reflecting a lot of incoming solar energy back into space. A permanent reduction of that surface would lead to additional heating of the atmosphere.
He faulted the statement for ignoring that carbon dioxide removal technologies will need to be scaled up massively to meet the 1.5 degree Celsius goal, and said there is still no convincing plan on how the transition away from fossil fuels will occur.
“We know it will not happen through national voluntary means alone. Collective, global agreements, on finance, carbon pricing, and technology exchange, are also needed, at a scale that vastly exceeds what is now on the table,” he said.
The new COP28 agreement also calls for “accelerating and substantially reducing non-carbon-dioxide emissions globally, including in particular methane emissions by 2030,” and for speeding the reduction of emissions from road transport, as well as “phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.”
Kerry said the document should be seen as a significant achievement, given the challenge of trying to win consensus among 200 parties. “For the first time in the history of our regime, the decision supported by all nations of the world calls for transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, so as to achieve net zero by 2050,” Kerry said.
“That is clear,” he said, even if it is not as strong as many would have liked.
Kerry said the applause that rang out in the plenary for the small island state representatives was “a clarion call to all of us about our obligation and responsibility over these next months to make sure we’re reaching as far as we can to implement as fast as we can.”
“We are a little confused about what just happened,” the delegate from Samoa said on behalf of AOSIS. “It seems that you gavelled the decisions, and the small island developing states were not in the room. We were working hard to coordinate the 39 small island developing states that are disproportionately affected by climate change, and so were delayed in coming here.”
The agreement falls far short of what would be needed to prevent some island states from being swamped by rising seas by the end of the century, AOSIS wrote, referring to it as a “draft decision,” which implies that the group doesn’t consider the document finalized.
“The course correction that is needed has not yet been secured,” the AOSIS statement continues. “We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual when what we really needed is an exponential step-change in our actions and support … We do not see any commitment or even an invitation for Parties to peak emissions by 2025.”
Mauna Loa is WMO Global Atmosphere Watch benchmark station and monitors rising CO2 levels Week of 23 April 2023: 424.40 parts per million Weekly value one year ago: 420.19 ppm Weekly value 10 years ago: 399.32 ppm 📷 http://CO2.Earthhttps://co2.earth/daily-co2. Credit: World Meteorological Organization
Although the decision frequently refers to science showing that fossil fuels must be phased out, the agreement doesn’t include a path toward the needed actions, the island states said.
“It is not enough for us to reference the science and then make agreements that ignore what the science is telling us we need to do,” the group wrote.
“I think AOSIS wanted to highlight that this decision could not be seen as being adopted in their name,” said Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney with the Center for International Environmental Law. “The outcome is not enough to protect their sovereign rights, human rights of future generations.”
Statements from other countries during the closing plenary showed that the consensus touted by al-Jaber is fragile, and was reached mainly to avoid the appearance of a disappointing failure.
The German delegate said there were tears in the room, but that they were not all tears of joy, and spoke directly to island states: “Samoa, Marshall Islands, we see you, we feel you, we know this might not be enough.”
Some oil producing countries from the Arab League said the new agreement veered too far off the Paris Agreement by ignoring the principle of national self-determination, by mentioning a timeline, however vague, for the energy transition, and by shifting the conversation away from emissions to the source of emissions.
COP28 followed a now-familiar pattern: Heads of state, heads of governments and ministers flying in on private jets at the beginning of the talks—in the case of the United Kingdom, three high-level representatives all arriving on separate private jets—and making flashy announcements about scientifically unfounded non-binding deals. [ed. emphasis mine]
The ice sheets of Antarctica are one of the world’s most noted tipping elements. Melt water from the Nansen ice shelf fracture in Antarctica. Photo by Stuart Rankin (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Representatives for Indigenous communities and civil society environmental groups said the agreement doesn’t go nearly far enough to ensure the fossil fuel phase out science demands, or toward ensuring climate justice for developing countries.
Missing is language to ensure that rich nations go first and fast to end their fossil fuel addiction, and the groups pointed out that planned oil and gas developments in just a handful of rich, developed countries are enough to “bust the goal of 1.5 degrees.”
Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty
The outcome perpetuates a 500-year legacy of colonialism and will lead to more inequality in the future by continuing to encourage the commodification of nature, the Indigenous representatives said. And even though the final documents recognize the role of Indigenous people as the guardians of Mother Earth, “Our rights and knowledge continue to be sidelined in these discussions,” an Indigenous representative said.
The head of the Marshall Islands delegation, John Silk, called the outcome dishonest.
“I came from my home islands to work with you to solve the greatest challenge of our generations, to build a canoe together for my country …” he said. “We have built a canoe with a weak and leaky hull. Yet we have to put it into the water because we have no other option,” he said.
“I appreciate the effort that has gone into this outcome, but it has not been inclusive,” he said. “The fact that the decision was gavelled without a major group in the room … is unacceptable … This is a small step in the right direction in this process, a good signal. But in the context of the real world, where temperatures are rising and people are dying, it is not enough. And so as we sail this leaky canoe together, let’s agree to patch the holes so we can keep the canoe afloat for the sake of all of us, especially the most vulnerable.”
Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
In one home video, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah bops to a choreographed Beyoncé dance. In another, she looks at the camera, and her mom and plants a big kiss on her lips. Then there is a photo of her mid-laugh when she told her mom she could not climb any more steps at a monument. And in some of the final images taken of Ella as she neared the end of her all-too-brief life, the 9-year-old lies in a London hospital room struggling to breathe, an oxygen mask covering nearly all of her tiny, oval face.
When she died in 2013, after years of seizures and a long struggle with asthma, Ella’s death marked a grim milestone in the planet’s battle against climate change: She is believed to be the first person for whom “air pollution” was listed as her official cause of death.
“Not only do you have to grieve, but to carry this and to fight this is huge,” Ella’s mother, Rosamond Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, said of her work as an advocate for clean air during the decade since her daughter’s death. “You do have to thank God for His mercy. But I think it’s the injustice of it all, seeing it all continue. I think that’s also quite heartbreaking.”
If, in the years since her death, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah has emerged as a symbol of the fight against air pollution, then this year’s COP28 conference on climate change in Dubai stands as a reminder of how the crisis continues to worsen.
On the eve of the conference, a peer-reviewed study in the British Medical Journal found that there were more than 8 million deaths each year that are attributable to air pollution and fine particulate matter. Roughly 5 million of those deaths, the scientists said, could be directly traced to the air pollution caused by fossil fuels.
“I think it’s easy when we hear these statistics to let them wash over us,” said Jane Burston, chief executive officer and founder of the Clean Air Fund, during the conference’s first ever “Health Day” on Sunday. “They’re big, big numbers; we listen to them, and then we forget. But the people that don’t forget are the families who are absolutely devastated by the quality of life of their loved one’s deteriorating, and ultimately their death.”
Burston noted that deaths from air pollution are rising—a 2020 study cited 6.6 million related deaths in 2019— and are expected to double by 2050.
Those deaths are also expected to disproportionately affect low-income communities and people of color, who, researchers say, because of limited economic opportunities, bias and other systemic factors are often compelled to live in areas where air quality is worse than their wealthier and white counterparts.
With that in mind, many attended the conference, which began Nov. 30 and ends on Dec. 13, with environmental justice and equity as issues at the top of mind.
Robert Bullard, a distinguished professor of sociology at Texas Southern University who is regarded as the father of the environmental justice movement, was in attendance at the conference and said in an interview that he was disappointed by the relative dearth of attention paid to addressing systemic inequities.
Bullard said that he was also discouraged by comments from Sultan al-Jaber, the president of the conference, who said last week that there was “no science” to support the contention that phasing out the use of fossil fuels could slow global warming.
Robert Bullard, a Texas Southern University professor, was disappointed by the handling of environmental justice issues at this year’s COP28. Credit: Courtesy of Robert Bullard
“It’s almost like ignoring the facts, ignoring the data and ignoring all of the studies that are showing the health benefits of getting off of fossil fuels,” Bullard said. “This is not some low-level bureaucrat. This is the person over this whole thing. And if that’s the framing, then it means that going forward, there’s probably less of a chance of taking health as seriously. It’s as if you were going to keep doing the same thing.”
Bullard noted that the handling of environmental justice issues contrasts sharply with what he experienced at last year’s gathering in Egypt, an event where organizers seemed determined to “bring the world’s climate justice, environmental justice, organizations and institutions and friendly governments under one big umbrella and one big tent.”
This year?
“This COP seems to be taken over by the oil and gas, fossil fuel entities,” he said. “And it’s to the point where it’s really a bit disturbing given the urgency in which we need to move away from that type of energy.”
Given that this year’s meeting was held in the United Arab Emirates—which produces about 2.8 million barrels of oil a day—Bullard said that he expected a significant presence from industry officials.
“But to have it come forward in such an in-your-face way is a bit disturbing,” he said.
Many researchers were encouraged by a declaration on climate and health that was signed by over 100 countries recognizing “the urgency of taking action on climate change” and noting “the benefits for health from deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, including from just transitions, lower air pollution, active mobility, and shifts to sustainable healthy diets.”
In addition to concerns about air pollution, the conference also focused attention on other ways that climate change is affecting public health—from weather changes to the spread of illnesses and pathogens.
“I think it just bears reminding that the evidence abounds showing that rising temperatures and sea levels, more frequent and intense extreme weather events, the heavy rains and typhoons, cyclones, heat waves, floods,” said Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders. “In addition to all these events, we’re seeing altered patterns of infectious diseases, malaria, dengue, shifting to new zones.”
Benoît said she hopes that this COP will highlight these issues and drive home the important link between the environment and our health.
“You need concrete political action to implement all those solutions that we know are out there to limit climate change, to limit the devastating impacts of it on humanitarian crises,” she said.
“It gets into this very, very, fragile, delicate developing child system,” Sorensen said. “And this is why the World Health Organization predicts something like 90 percent of health impacts are going to be on this next generation because they start experiencing these exposures even before they’re born.”
Sorensen said those impacts are amplified throughout the life of the child.
“There’s been really good data looking at when you’re able to shut down fossil fuel producing facilities and in neighborhoods where there’s populations who are pregnant, that birth outcomes improve,” she said. “You can think about the benefits of that to the health and longevity of those individuals, but also about the avoided health costs and the benefits to the economy and to society. It’s huge.”
Mitigating those crises in her own small way is now Rosamond Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s mission. She continues to work to keep other families from experiencing the pain that has endured for her family since Ella’s death.
Craig Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 1, 2023
Wholesale power provider for 42 electrical cooperatives hopes for federal help as it pivots from coal-heavy portfolio during the next few years.
In planning for the years 2026-2031, Tri-State Generation and Transmission wants to hasten its exits from two coal plants and add a ton of new wind and solar generation plus battery storage. This is to supplemented by new electrical production from natural gas.
The electric resource plan is to be filed with the Colorado Public Utilities by 5 p.m. [December 1, 2023]. However, these details were obtained by Big Pivots from a memorandum sent to members of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association. Important details were confirmed by other stakeholders.
Two accelerated coal plant retirements will be identified in the PUC filing. At Craig, in northwest Colorado, the utility proposes to advance the retirement of its last coal-burning unit to no later or earlier than Jan. 1, 2028, two years earlier than is currently the plan.
The proposal also calls for retirement of Springerville Unit 3, a 400-megawatt coal-burning unit in Arizona. Tri-State had not previously announced plans for retiring the plant, in which it holds a 51% interest, according to a September 2023 Securities and Administration filing. The proposal calls for a retirement no later than Sept. 15, 2031, but leaves the door open for a sooner date.
Tri-State does not see getting out of fossil fuels. It will retain an interest in a coal plant near Wheatland, Wyo., called Laramie River Station.
It also proposes to augment its existing natural-gas-burning fleet with a combined-cycle gas plant. That plant could also be coupled with carbon capture and sequestration technology. Tri-State has 8 member cooperatives in Wyoming in addition to 18 in Colorado, with others in New Mexico and Nebraska. Tri-State has significant transmission across the four-state region.
Not least, Tri-State proposes to add 1,240 megawatts of new renewable generation plus 210 megawatts of energy storage in four installations.
Many of these ambitions depend almost entirely upon federal funding to buy down debt on assets stranded as the United States tries to dampen its greenhouse gas emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allocated $9.7 billion for a national program called New ERA (Empowering Rural Communities).
In September, Jeff Wadsworth, chief executive of Poudre Valley Electric, one of the largest of Tri-State’s 42 member cooperatives, told Big Pivots that the New ERA was the “single biggest investment for electric cooperatives since the New Deal.” The law creating the Rural Electrification Administration was passed by Congress in 1936, providing federal aid for extension of electrical lines to rural areas.
As the IRA was being crafted in 2022, Tri-State representatives lobbied Congress and the Biden administration hard to carve out funds for the energy transition in rural communities.
Tri-State has filed a letter of interest in applying for $970 million in federal funds. Whether it will get full funding is uncertain. In its SEC filing Tri-State reported overall long-term debt of $2.9 billion.
The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, or NRECA, in September pointed out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency responsible for administering the program, had received 157 letters of interest from electric co-ops for 750 projects. The money is to be divided between small- and medium-sized cooperatives as well as Tri-State and other large cooperatives.
The federal agency has not set a timeline for a decision on federal funding, but stakeholders in the Tri-State process at the PUC expect a decision from commissioners by early summer. This presumed a decision by federal funding by mid-spring.
In a memo sent to some members of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association on Tuesday, the organization’s president, Mike Kruger, and general counsel, Ellen Howard Kutzer, said they believe it is best to support Tri-State in its quest for federal aid.
“We continue to believe it is better for the Colorado energy market to have a solvent and functioning Tri-State making an energy transition,” they said.
COSSA and several other key groups involved in the proceeding at the PUC agree to a stipulation that expresses their broad support while reserving the right to push back on elements that aren’t part of the plan that presumes federal money through the New ERA program. Other signatories include Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club, and the Colorado Energy Office as well as two of Tri-State member cooperatives. At least two other groups declined.
The Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate, the state agency with the mission of speaking on behalf of consumers, also supported the narrow agreement.
“We are supportive of the broad concept that Tri-State has laid out in their electric resource plan, although we think there is a lot of work to do,” said Joseph Pereria, deputy director of the agency. “There are a lot of unknowns, but a good process has been started.”
Tri-State’s insistence that it needs more natural gas backup for its major expansion into renewables is likely to be a major source of disagreement going forward. Xcel Energy and Platte River Power Authority are making the same argument as they prepare for a life of making electricity without coal.
Another major discussion will likely be about what constitutes just transition for Craig as it closes its coal-burning units. In adopting its goals for dramatic decarbonization in 2019, Colorado legislators also created an Office of Just Transition. The mission as summarized by the agency is to help “workers transition to new, high-quality jobs, to help communities continue to thrive by expanding and attracting diverse businesses, and to replace lost revenues.”
What this means in practice, though, is unclear. In the case of Pueblo, Xcel Energy has agreed to pay property taxes for 10 years after the last of the three coal-burning units at the Comanche Generating Station closes by 2031. As part of that process, Xcel will be conducting what is called a just transition electric resource plan. Xcel will see what kind of assets needed for its business can be located in Pueblo to replace the lost tax base and jobs.
Northwest Colorado communities need the same level of consideration and assistance, said Pereira.
Pueblo has started the conversation. “Craig and Moffat County are in a different part of the state, with different needs and concerns,” he said. “So it’s important that we listen to those communities and that we think big about how we can help them plan for a future without coal.”
Wade Buchanan, director of the Office of Just Transition, said only that it’s useful to have certainty when planning for retirements of coal plants and mines.
Interested in methane and other greenhouse gas emissions near you? Check out http://climatetrace.org, which allows you to see emissions from oil and gas fields, large individual facilities, and more. You can also break it down by industry.
A bunch of world leaders, a handful of activists and oodles of fossil fuel lobbyists are convened in the United Arab Emirates for the annual United Nations climate conference, or COP28. They’re doing a lot of talking about climate, but are they doing any doing to solve the climate crisis? Not a lot, but they did do some talking about doing.
Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas and is a potent greenhouse gas, having about 86 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over the near-term (methane in the atmosphere breaks down into carbon dioxide and water over the long-term). Methane naturally occurs in coal seams and in oil and gas reservoirs. Oil wells also contain methane and other “associated gases” that can include health-harming volatile organic compounds and deadly hydrogen sulfide.
Sometimes the methane is captured, processed, and marketed as natural gas. But the entire system is prone to leakage, some of it intentional, most not. And when the driller is focused on oil, the methane and other gases are often vented directly into the air or flared, i.e. burned off. Either way, the oil and gas industry emits gobs of methane and other compounds, including nasty carcinogens like benzene. This is not only bad for the environment, but also wasteful: Natural gas lost to leaks or flaring is not taxed and generates no royalties, meaning the state and federal governments — i.e. the taxpayers — are losing out on millions of dollars each year.
The Obama administration and then the Biden administration worked for years on regulations to tackle these emissions, but previous proposals have often come up short. Obama’s EPA, for example, implemented rules that would only cover new oil and gas wells, leaving the tens of thousands of wells contributing to the Four Corners Methane Hot Spot, for example, untouched (the BLM had its own set of rules for existing facilities). Earlier iterations also weren’t strong enough on flaring, didn’t regulate pneumatic controllers (a major emissions source) and exempted the low-producing wells that are common in the Western U.S. and that tend to be leakier than the big producers.
The new rules, while providing some flexibility for operators, fill in most of the gaps in earlier drafts. They will phase out flaring on new wells; require leak-detection surveys on a monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly basis (depending on type and size of facility); and require even low-producing wells to pipe associated gases to market or use them to replace other fuels onsite if at all possible. The rules also allow the EPA to “leverage data collected by certified third parties to identify and address ‘super emitting’ sources.”
Land and public health protectors generally have praised the new rule. “The U.S. EPA has taken bold action to cut methane pollution from oil and gas production,” said Robyn Jackson, Executive Director of Diné C.A.R.E., in a written statement. “Inspections at smaller wells with leaky equipment are especially important at the older infrastructure we see in Navajo Country.” Jackson emphasized that it is now up to the Navajo Nation EPA — and other tribal nations and state governments — to implement the rules for existing sources, adding: “Both federal and tribal government action is critical to protect our communities, our health, and our future.”
For more on this topic, check out our four-part series, Methane Madness, from 2021:
Some folks will read the news about the methane rule and whatnot and get all upset about Biden waging a war on American energy production and compromising our energy independence and putting a bunch of roughnecks out of work. The data say: Not quite, buddy.
In fact, U.S. crude oil production hit a new all-time daily record high in September of this year and is on pace to set a new annual record, as well. That is to say, the hundreds of thousands of wells that pockmark the nation will suck nearly a billion more barrels of oil from the earth this year than they did during the energy crises of the 1970s and 80s. Ack!
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Most of the gains are due to a drilling frenzy in the Permian Basin, which stretches across southeastern New Mexico and western Texas. It’s one of the most productive fields in the world; it’s also one of the planet’s largest methane emitters.
1.36 million: Tons of methane emitted from the New Mexico side of the Permian Basin oil and gas fields in 2022.
3.38 million: Tons of methane emitted from the Texas side of the Permian Basin oil and gas fields in 2022.
133: Tons of methane emitted by the HollyFrontier Navajo Refinery in southeastern New Mexico in 2022.
35,951: Tons of methane emitted from the Colorado side of the San Juan Basin coalbed methane fields in 2022.
19,010: Tons of methane emitted from the now defunct San Juan Coal Mine in northwestern New Mexico in 2022.
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
And when you hear about how the new methane rules are going to hit oil and gas operators in the pocketbook, just keep this one number in mind:
$26.33 billion: Third quarter 2023 combined profits for the Permian Basin’s ten largest operators: Pioneer, EOG, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, Diamondback, Devon, Chevron, Mewbourne, and Endeavor. Yes, that’s for just one quarter!
This isn’t happening because of Biden, necessarily, but it’s also not happening in spite of his administration’s policies. Indeed, Biden is walking a fine line on oil and gas, approving big projects like Willow up in Alaska and approving thousands of drilling permits on public lands, while also implementing new regulations, establishing national monuments, and withdrawing millions of acres of federal lands from future oil and gas leasing.
Biden is approving public land drilling permits at about the same rate as Obama did during the height of the drilling boom. Note: The high numbers in fiscal year 2021 are mostly attributable to the Trump administration, which issued thousands of permits in the months before Biden was inaugurated. So even though more permits were issued in 2023 than in 2022, Biden’s approval pace is still slower than Trump’s was in his final two years in office. Source: BLM; graphic by Land Desk.
Air pollution particles from coal-fired power plants are more harmful to human health than many experts realized, and it’s more than twice as likely to contribute to premature deaths as air pollution particles from other sources, new research demonstrates.
In the study, published in the journal Science, colleagues and I mapped how U.S. coal power plant emissions traveled through the atmosphere, then linked each power plant’s emissions with death records of Americans over 65 years old on Medicare.
Our results suggest that air pollutants released from coal power plants were associated with nearly half a million premature deaths of elderly Americans from 1999 to 2020.
It’s a staggering number, but the study also has good news: Annual deaths associated with U.S. coal power plants have fallen sharply since the mid-2000s as federal regulations compelled operators to install emissions scrubbers and many utilities shut down coal plants entirely.
In 1999, 55,000 deaths were attributable to coal air pollution in the U.S., according to our findings. By 2020, that number had fallen to 1,600.
In the U.S., coal is being displaced by natural gas and renewable energy for generating electricity. Globally, however, coal use is projected to increase in coming years. That makes our results all the more urgent for global decision-makers to understand as they develop future policies.
Coal air pollution: What makes it so bad?
A landmark study in the 1990s, known as the Harvard Six Cities Study, linked tiny airborne particles called PM2.5 to increased risk of early death. Other studies have since linked PM2.5 to lung and heart disease, cancer, dementia and other diseases.
PM2.5 — particles small enough to be inhaled deep into our lungs — comes from several different sources, including gasoline combustion in vehicles and smoke from wood fires and power plants. It is made up of many different chemicals.
Coal is also a mix of many chemicals — carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, even metals. When coal is burned, all of these chemicals are emitted to the atmosphere either as gases or particles. Once there, they are transported by the wind and interact with other chemicals already in the atmosphere.
As a result, anyone downwind of a coal plant may be breathing a complex cocktail of chemicals, each with its own potential effects on human health.
Tracking coal PM2.5
To understand the risks coal emissions pose to human health, we tracked how sulfur dioxide emissions from each of the 480 largest U.S. coal power plants operating at any point since 1999 traveled with the wind and turned into tiny particles — coal PM2.5. We used sulfur dioxide because of its known health effects and drastic decreases in emissions over the study period.
We then used a statistical model to link coal PM2.5 exposure to Medicare records of nearly 70 million people from 1999 to 2020. This model allowed us to calculate the number of deaths associated with coal PM2.5.
In our statistical model, we controlled for other pollution sources and accounted for many other known risk factors, like smoking status, local meteorology and income level. We tested multiple statistical approaches that all yielded consistent results. We compared the results of our statistical model with previous results testing the health impacts of PM2.5 from other sources and found that PM2.5 from coal is twice as harmful as PM2.5 from all other sources.
The number of deaths associated with individual power plants depended on multiple factors — how much the plant emits, which way the wind blows and how many people breathe in the pollution. Unfortunately, U.S. utilities located many of their plants upwind of major population centers on the East Coast. This siting amplified these plants’ impacts.
In an interactive online tool, users can look up our estimates of annual deaths associated with each U.S. power plant and also see how those numbers have fallen over time at most U.S. coal plants.
Coal’s role in US electric power generation fell quickly Coal declined significantly as a U.S. source of electricity generation as natural gas and renewable energy increased over the past 15 years.
A U.S. success story and the global future of coal
Engineers have been designing effective scrubbers and other pollution-control devices that can reduce pollution from coal-fired power plants for several years. And the EPA has rules specifically to encourage utilities that used coal to install them, and most facilities that did not install scrubbers have shut down.
The results have been dramatic: Sulfur dioxide emissions decreased about 90% in facilities that reported installing scrubbers. Nationwide, sulfur dioxide emissions decreased 95% since 1999. According to our tally, deaths attributable to each facility that installed a scrubber or shut down decreased drastically.
As advances in fracking techniques reduced the cost of natural gas, and regulations made running coal plants more expensive, utilities began replacing coal with natural gas plants and renewable energy. The shift to natural gas — a cleaner-burning fossil fuel than coal but still a greenhouse gas contributing to climate change — led to even further air pollution reductions.
Today, coal contributes about 27% of electricity in the U.S., down from 56% in 1999.
Globally, however, the outlook for coal is mixed. While the U.S. and other nations are headed toward a future with substantially less coal, the International Energy Agency expects global coal use to increase through at least 2025.
Our study and others like it make clear that increases in coal use will harm human health and the climate. Making full use of emissions controls and a turn toward renewables are surefire ways to reduce coal’s negative impacts.
Lucas Henneman is an assistant professor of engineering at George Mason University. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Martin Drake Coal Plant Colorado Springs. The coal plant in downtown Colorado Springs will be closed by 2023 and 7 gas-fired generators moved in to generate power until 2030. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
KEMMERER—TerraPower, backed by billionaire Bill Gates and the U.S. Department of Energy, plans to build the pilot “Natrium” liquid-sodium-cooled nuclear energy plant here, hoping its success will spur the deployment of Natrium and other small nuclear reactors throughout the nation and around the world.
A schematic of TerraPower’s proposed Natrium nuclear power plant. Credit: TerraPower
The next-generation technology presents myriad considerations for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has authority over the safety, security and environmental implications of such facilities. It would also be the first industrial nuclear facility in Wyoming, and locals have many questions:
Does the NRC take seismic activity into account? When might the spent radioactive fuel waste be shipped off to a permanent storage facility? Will there be regular NRC inspections, and how often?
Sen. Dan Dockstader (R-Afton), however, shares another concern that is top-of-mind for locals who are eager for the economic boost that developers promise: Can the NRC speed up the approval process “if you get the right people in place?
“I’m running out of time planning and creating legislation to make sure this all comes together,” he said.
Dockstader was among more than 100 local residents who attended the NRC’s two information sessions here Tuesday. The agency sent a dozen staff members to this isolated southwestern Wyoming town of 2,400 to field questions about what many anticipate will be an expedited review process.
Review process
TerraPower and its contractors have already drilled more than 100 boreholes here to help “investigate” the suitability of the location, according to the company, and it plans to begin construction of the sodium testing facility and other non-nuclear portions of the 345-megawatt Natrium nuclear reactor energy plant in 2024.
Sen. Dan Dockstader (R-Afton) poses a question to Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials during a public meeting Nov. 7, 2023, in Kemmerer. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
The nuclear plant will be “co-located” next to PacifiCorp’s Naughton power plant just outside of Kemmerer. One coal-burning unit at the plant was converted to natural gas, and the two remaining units there will be converted to natural gas in 2026.
Before the company can begin assembling the nuclear components, however, it must complete a licensing application that can pass the NRC’s review process, which includes several opportunities for the public to weigh in on the proposal. The NRC expects to receive TerraPower’s application, and initiate the official review process in March.
“Now is an opportune time to conduct this initial outreach and to explain the analysis process of reviewing applications for construction and operation,” NRC’s Chief of Advanced Reactor Licensing William Jessup said.
Although the NRC is developing a new review process specific to “advanced” reactors such as Natrium, which uses molten sodium as a coolant instead of water, TerraPower has tentatively agreed to seek approval via the long existing “Part 50” review, according to Jessup. It includes multiple review tracks, each with a safety and environmental component: one to consider a construction permit, and another to consider an operating license. The process requires the NRC to produce an environmental impact statement — all of which include public input and multiple opportunities for the normal administrative and legal challenges that come with large federal permitting activities, Jessup explained.
Typically, the arduous NRC review can take up to seven years or more to complete — with no guarantee of final approval. Last year, the NRC denied Oklo Power, LLC’s application to build a “fast reactor” in Idaho for allegedly failing to provide sufficient information on the facility’s design.
TerraPower — which is embarking on its first NRC licensing attempt — hopes to win approval much sooner, however, thanks in part to the 2019 Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act. The law — championed by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) — set a maximum review timeline of 36 months. Additionally, TerraPower expects to help the NRC trim that timeline even further by filing information ahead of schedule.
It all depends on TerraPower submitting thorough information that doesn’t require many requests to fill in unanswered questions, according to the NRC.
Patricia Vokoun, Mallecia Sutton and William Jessup of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission field questions during a public meeting Nov. 7, 2023, in Kemmerer. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
“If we have all of these discussions and address all of these topics before the application even comes in, then you would expect that it may make the review go faster,” Jessup told WyoFile.
Questions
Many locals are eager for the potential economic boon the $4 billion project might bring to this region, which has long relied on the diminishing coal industry to power its economy. But many of the same people, and others, are concerned about the high-stake risks that come with a nuclear facility.
Does the NRC take seismic activity into account?
Yes, NRC officials said, adding that they are aware that there is seismic activity in the Rocky Mountain Region.
Several residents, including Rep. Scott Heiner (R-Green River), asked when the radioactive spent fuel might be transported to a permanent storage facility.
“Is there a permanent solution for waste that is being worked on at this time?” Heiner asked.
No, there is no permanent nuclear fuel waste repository in the U.S. at the moment, NRC officials said. Though NRC staff in attendance indicated they “anticipate” one will be built, others have long indicated that there’s no clear path to building a permanent repository, which has been discussed for decades.
For now, that means spent nuclear fuel will be “temporarily” stored on site — for how long, nobody knows.
The NRC also fielded questions about how nuclear fuel will be transported to the facility and how safety of those radioactive materials will be ensured. The NRC, along with several other federal agencies, closely manage the transport of such materials in cooperation with state agencies, according to staff members. A specific plan, however, will be worked out in the NRC’s review, they said.
NRC representatives also assured locals that they will maintain partnerships with local emergency managers and state environmental authorities.
Many questions about TerraPower’s Natrium design, however — such as water consumption and where the company will find enough construction and permanent workers — are up to the company to answer. However, most of those details — with the exception of information that the NRC agrees to deem proprietary — will be included in the application and public review, according to NRC staff.
“That’s the reason we’re here tonight,” Jessup said. “We’re here to get the message out early about our process and how to interact.”
Downtown Denver from the Denver Art Museum. Photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
Study finds that existing technology can get Colorado to near-zero electricity without need for breakthroughs in geothermal, nuclear or other realms. It will require a bit of natural gas.
Colorado can decarbonize its electricity very deeply by 2040 without busting the bank. But there’s a catch.
To hit this 98.5% decarbonization level will require accepting natural gas as 1% of the mix along with a small percentage of carbon-based electricity imported into Colorado. And getting there will not require still-costly emerging technologies.
That’s the take-away from a modeling study commissioned by the Colorado Energy Office.
How about 100% emissions-free electricity? That can be achieved, and in several different ways — all of them at a higher price, according to the modeling conducted by Ascend Analytics, a Boulder-based company.
The company modeled two other scenarios deploying deep levels of geothermal, hydrogen, and advanced nuclear reactors as well as other emerging technologies. Still another scenario examined the cost of using simply wind, solar, and existing battery technology. And one scenario emphasized local generation.
These five other scenarios came in at prices of $47.1 billion to $56.2 billion in net-present value — all substantially higher than the $37.5 billion of the less-than-perfect scenario using some natural gas.
Burning natural gas on an as-needed basis to ensure reliability will produce 565,000 metric tons of emissions in 2040. That compares with 40 million tons in 2005, according to the modeling study. This scenario also envisions a higher share of electricity , about 17%, being imported into Colorado.
All the scenarios in the modeling assume substantial amounts of improved energy efficiency, in effect partially eliminating the need for new generation. All models also assume that Colorado utilities will, as required by a state law, be participating in some sort of regional market for electricity by 2030.
Will Toor, director of the Colorado Energy Office, called the study results “huge.”
“The biggest takeaway of the study is understanding that we can get very deep emissions reductions, nearly zero emissions by 2040 while minimizing costs to utility customers. That is not something that we understood going into this study,” he said in an interview.
“As we look at developing the policy framework for 2040, it will be very much informed by that understanding,” he added.
The modeling study will likely deliver the justification for a bill in the legislative session beginning in January that would propose a new emissions-reduction target for Colorado’s electrical utilities. Laws adopted in 2019 and in subsequent years tasked those utilities with reducing emissions 80% by 2030. Most and perhaps all seem to be on track to get there with relative ease.
Some moving higher more quickly
Some utilities expect to get far higher—and soon. Notable is Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative based in Glenwood Springs. It expects to achieve 92% emissions-free electricity by early in 2024 and has a goal of 100% by 2030.
Bryan Hannegan, chief executive of Holy Cross, has long said that the path to 90% was reasonably clear. The hard part, with answers still unknown, he has said, will be that final 10%. And unlike the path to 90%, that final leg will likely be more expensive.
The modeling has any number of assumptions. Some likely are further out on the limb than others.
All the scenarios assume a 40% increase in electrical demand across Colorado during the next 17 years. Population growth will drive some of this new demand. Increased demand will also result from electricity replacing fossil fuels in both transportation and building and water heating.
To satisfy this increased demand will require new generation. Just how much new generation will depend upon the type. Wind and solar exclusively from generators within Colorado coupled with battery storage would require 74,492 megawatts of installed capacity. Having natural gas available will require far less, 44,474 megawatts.
On a more micro level and with a concrete challenge, Platte River Power Authority — the supplier to Fort Collins, Loveland, Estes Park and Longmont — is putting together its resource plan looking out to 2030. Directors in 2018 identified a goal of 100% renewables by 2030 but also attached a handful of conditions to that goal. Five years later, Platte River’s planners don’t see a way to 100% by 2030, at least not without risking reliability or absorbing considerable costs. One scenario calls for 85% renewables. The plan, however, is not scheduled to be completed until June.
For an explanation of the reasoning for a unanimous resolution by Platte River’s board of directors, see a blog by Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt, her city’s board representative.
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
Transmission, seen by many as critical to deep levels of emissions reductions, gets relatively little mention in the modeling report. Arguably, an entire scenario could be built around potential for transmission upgrades, such as greater ease of moving electricity between the Western Interconnection grid, of which Colorado is a part, and the Eastern Interconnection, which starts at Kansas and Nebraska.
Ascend Analytics had conducted similar modeling about deep, deep decarbonization of electricity for Los Angeles Water and Power. The question in that study was what would it take for Los Angeles to achieve zero-emissions electricity?
Twenty years ago Colorado and its electrical utilities almost entirely embraced coal generation as the cheapest energy source far into the future. By 15 years ago, that resolve had weakened. Voters had adopted the state’s first renewable energy mandate and legislators had upped it. Wind prices were swooping down. Not least utilities had become confident of keeping lights on while deploying wind and solar.
A watershed year was 2017. Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility, which supplies roughly half of the electricity in the state, sought bids for new electrical generation. The low prices for wind and solar dramatically undercut those of fossil fuels. Proponents of renewables were elated. A year later, Xcel Energy announced its plans for 80% decarbonization by 2030. The paradigm had shifted.
Most of those wind, solar, and storage projects bid in 2017 have now or soon will go on line. Statistics for 2023 are not yet available. However, as of 2022, renewable energy accounted for 37% of the state’s electrical generation, with wind power accounting for four-fifths of that renewable generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Two coal plants have closed since 2017 and now eight more will be laid down before the end of 2031. One, Pawnee, located at Brush, is to be converted to natural gas.
Toor said his agency began having discussions in 2022 about the next steps beyond 2030. The questions guided creation of the modeling study. The state called in utilities, environmental groups, industrial sectors, and others for conversations about how to frame the study.
What some said
Ean Tafoya, the Colorado director for GreenLatinos, a national advocacy group, said he remembers the first meeting occurring in May. Based on the number of those interested in environmental justice invited to participate as stakeholders, he suspects dozens of stakeholders were involved.
The results of the modeling Tafoya described as “very promising.”
“It shows me that the emerging technologies that my community has been very concerned about, that we don’t need them,” he said, referring to hydrogen, carbon capture and sequestration and direct-air capture as well as deep-well geothermal. “And if we can do this by 2040 without change of policy, that is very exciting.”
If Colorado can find ways to leverage capital through green infrastructure banking and address workforce training, Colorado “can truly be a leader nationally and globally,” he added.
Xcel Energy issued a statement that said the company was “encouraged by the Colorado Energy Office’s findings.”
“We agree there is a need for new 24/7 carbon-free technology to achieve deep carbon reductions. The state’s policies will enable us to reduce carbon emissions greater than 80% by 2030 and will inform our future investments into the local infrastructure necessary to move clean energy reliably into our customers’ homes – while keeping bills low.”
Do Colorado’s modeling results suggest a template for other states or regions of the United States, even other countries? Toor thinks so.
“It is saying that you can get to near-zero greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from electricity generation within the next 20 years —with no incremental cost to customers. That’s true with other states, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a red state or blue state. “Regulators and utilities should be excited about the ability to minimize costs to customers while nearly entirely eliminating emissions. I think that is a really important conclusion.”
That said, added Toor, other states are starting at different places. “We have already had substantial progress.”
Colorado also is blessed with renewable resources. It has wind – not the best, but among the best. It also has strong solar. Again, not the best, but very good.
“I want to be careful about claiming insight into other states, but I do think it is a very striking result that you can achieve such deep pollution reductions simply by developing the lowest-cost resources,” said Toor.
In creating the documents, Ascent based its projected costs of various technologies on projections by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory but also Ascend’s Market Intelligence Team.
How fast will technology move?
Even with those presumably careful calculations based on strong information, how good are they? After all, 20 years ago, the cost numbers argued for coal. Incredibly, some people still try to make that argument.
Also 20 years ago, many smart people projected the imminent arrival of both peak oil and, by extension, peak natural gas. Those projections, based on rear-view mirror data, failed to anticipate the rapid incremental advances in hydrofracturing, horizontal drilling and other extraction technology. From $14.50 per million Btu in 2008, natural gas prices plummeted to $2.50 with the recession – but never returned to the stratospheric levels that justified poking very deep holes across the Piceance Basin southwest of Craig. Meantime, the U.S. became a net exporter of oil.
Of course, we have had similar cost curves with wind, then solar, and now storage prices.
Might the same thing occur with geothermal, using underground heat to produce electricity, as is already done in California and some other places? Sarah Jewett, vice president for strategy at Fervo Energy, suggested cause for similar optimism in her industry during her remarks at the Colorado Rural Electric Association conference on Monday. The cost curve in recent projects in Utah and Nevada has been bending downward, she said.
Earlier that same day, a panel of experts about nuclear energy reported cause for optimism about nuclear, while yet another panel predicted reason to believe hydrogen will play an important role in the future.
Toor acknowledged the unexpected cost declines for many technologies. “It’s quite possible that hydrogen and other technologies will be lower cost than now projected,” he said.
Regardless, he added, these near-zero or zero-emissions pathways should become the baseline.
“I think it would be important that utilities are looking at new technologies and that utility regulators are able to look at getting to even deeper reductions based on what the actual cost trajectories turn out to be,” he said.
Colorado’s energy regulation framework is well suited to achieving those deep reductions —even deeper than the low-cost 98.5% emissions-free that this modeling suggests will be possible.
A final report, after review by stakeholders, is expected in December.
Following are what the modeling study cites as its key findings. The language is verbatim from the report:
The Economic Deployment scenario, which relies on current state and federal policies and is projected to meet demand at the lowest cost, is projected to reliably meet electricity needs in 2040 while achieving 98.5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 2040 from a 2005 level while also achieving near zero emissions reduction in nitrous oxide and sulfur oxide.
Wind and solar will be the main source of electricity in Colorado in 2040. In the Economic Deployment scenario, 76% of electricity comes from in-state wind and solar; 16% comes from out-of-state imports of near zero-emissions electricity (mostly wind from a wholesale electricity market); and 10% from energy efficiency, with the rest coming from other sources. Across all other scenarios, in-state wind and solar account for more than 90% of electricity.
In the Economic Deployment scenario, gas-fired electricity generation meets only about 1% of total need for electricity.
Under current cost assumptions, the Optimized 100 scenario, which achieves zero emissions by 2040 using a technology-neutral, least-cost approach, selects a substantial amount of hydrogen and a modest amount of geothermal to complement wind, solar, and batteries. It is 25% more expensive than the economic deployment scenario.
The Wind, Solar and Battery scenario is 20% more expensive than the Optimized 100 scenario and 50% more expensive than the least cost Economic Deployment scenario. The Accelerate Geothermal scenario is 11% more expensive than the Optimized 100.
The Optimized 100 scenario retires all gas-fired generation by 2040. It replaces retiring gas capacity primarily with clean hydrogen starting in 2032. By 2040, this scenario has 5,061 MW of clean hydrogen and 125 MW of geothermal generation.
The model does not select gas with carbon capture or advanced modular reactors in any scenario because of the cost.
The Accelerated Geothermal scenario adds a requirement to have 10% of demand met with geothermal in 2040, which results in 1,989 MW of installed capacity (compared to 125 MW in the Optimized 100 scenario).
Mauna Loa is WMO Global Atmosphere Watch benchmark station and monitors rising CO2 levels Week of 23 April 2023: 424.40 parts per million Weekly value one year ago: 420.19 ppm Weekly value 10 years ago: 399.32 ppm 📷 http://CO2.Earthhttps://co2.earth/daily-co2. Credit: World Meteorological Organization
Click the link to read the article on The Los Angeles Times website (Alex Wigglesworth and Ian James). Here’s an excerpt:
The expanse of Sierra National Forest near Shaver Lake is a relic of the climate before global warming. Scientists believe that the conifers won’t be able to survive the current conditions. Researchers at Stanford University found in a recent study that roughly one-fifth of all conifer forests in the Sierra are mismatched with the warmer climate and have become “zombie forests.”
[…]
The findings indicate that these lower-elevation Sierra conifer forests, which include ponderosa pine, sugar pine and Douglas fir, are no longer able to successfully reproduce. Conditions have become too warm and dry to support conifer saplings, whose shallow roots require plenty of water if they are to survive into adulthood, Hill said. Giant sequoias also grow in lower-elevation areas of the Sierra Nevada, but the researchers didn’t analyze the risks specific to those trees.
When these forests burn in high-severity wildfires — or are wiped out by drought, disease or pests — they will likely be replaced by other types of trees and brush, the scientists said. That could dramatically slash how much carbon the region can store; provide a habitat for invasive species; and displace plants and animals that call the forests home.
The clean-energy transition may be inevitable, but may not happen fast enough, IEA says
The flagship annual report from the International Energy Agency, dubbed the World Energy Outlook, offers a rosy prediction of the growth of clean-energy technologies around the world. It portrays the decline of fossil fuels, the main driver of rising global temperatures, as all but inevitable.
“The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ — and the sooner the better for all of us.”
[…]
The IEA envisions green technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars taking off in the coming years, thanks to both supportive governmental policies and market forces. By 2030, it predicts:
Renewables’ share of the global electricity mix will approach 50 percent, up from around 30 percent today.
Three times as much investment will flow to offshore wind projects as to new coal- and gas-fired power plants.
The share of fossil fuels in the global energy supply will fall to 73 percent, down from about 80 percent today.
Still, demand for fossil fuels will remain too high for humanity to meet the goal of the Paris climate accord: limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the report says. On the supply side, the United States is churning out record amounts of oil. Yet negotiators at this fall’s United Nations climate summit, known as COP28, can make certain commitments that help keep the Paris target within reach, the IEA said. They include pledges to triple global renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements.
The shiny new cold-weather air source heat pump installed summer 2023 at Coyote Gulch Manor.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen “You got the story right, without going too long” Best):
Colorado’s Just Transition legislation intends to help coal-dependent communities like this one ease into an economy after coal
Yampa, the town of 400 near the headwaters of the river of the same name in northwest Colorado, recently got a small grant from the state’s Just Transition program designed for coal-reliant communities.
You won’t immediately see the presence of coal in Yampa. You will quickly recognize that for hunters, wilderness hikers, and anglers, it’s a gateway to the Flat Top mountains with all of their wilds and mysteries plus the reservoirs that store their melted snow. At the head of one of the creeks is a narrow bridge of land above timberline called the Devil’s Causeway. Those with acrophobia need not cross.
Yampa also lies amid a valley of hay ranches, emerald in some seasons but always comforting in their relative emptiness. This is a valley that to some is best described as “Colorado as it used to be.” It’s not crowded, nor is there a rush. Not surprisingly, Yampa is on a Colorado Scenic and Historic Byway.
The coal is less obvious. The closest active mine, Twentymile, Colorado’s fourth largest, is actually about 50 minutes to the north along sometimes winding roads choked by oak brush.
Yampa’s economy is intertwined closely with that of coal extraction at Twentymile. Some coal miners and others directly associated with the mine live in Yampa. Others work on the railroad. There’s even a motel for railroaders built in the 1990s and a café, Penny’s Diner, created specifically to ensure that railroaders can get a square meal at all hours of the day.
The coal economy of northwest Colorado is on the decline. Most of the coal mined at Twentymile travels only a short distance, to be burned at the two units at Hayden operated by Xcel Energy. The same is true for mines in Moffat and Rio Blanco counties, whose coal mostly if not entirely gets burned at the three units of the Craig Generating Station. That plant is operated by Tri-State Generation and Transmission.
All five coal-burning units are scheduled to cease operations from 2025 to 2030.
Will the coal mines continue operations? That’s unclear. Peabody Energy, the owner of Twentymile, has not said for certain what it plans.
Without reservation it can be said that the shipments of coal from Routt County through Yampa and to markets elsewhere have significantly declined in the last 20 years. The official evidence is scant. Coal companies don’t release such reports. But the anecdotal evidence—what locals can report about the frequency of passing trains —is abundant.
In recognition of this impact, Colorado has awarded Yampa a $105,000 grant for implementation of a business support program. The money is to be used for purchase of new and upgraded equipment for local businesses.
Some of the money will also be used to install signs along Highway 131, which passes on the edge of town. Many travelers use the highway to get between Steamboat Springs and the I-70 corridor.
Colorado also awarded a $600,000 grant to the Pioneers Medical Center in Meeker for implementation of a new electronic medical health record system. That was identified as the first step to expand healthcare services and long-term plans to develop medical tourism. See: “Medical tourism in a land of fishing poles & orange vests”
Both grants come from state funding allocated to smooth the transition of coal-dependent communities during the energy pivot underway in Colorado.
New jobs will be the end result of the grants, according to a press release issued by Gov. Jared Polis’s administration.
“As the economy moves away from the high cost of coal power, Colorado is helping local communities diversify their economies and creating new opportunities for their residents to be successful,” said Polis.
Yampa, the town, lies at the head of the Yampa River drainage on the eastern flanks of the Flat Tops. Top, Twentymile Mine in 2022 was Colorado’s four largest coal producer Photos/Allen Best
Paul Bonnifield, a resident, rejects the characterization of the new grant for Yampa as being a “nod of the hat.” In the context of Yampa’s municipal government, “it’s a pretty danged big chunk of money,” he said when asked for his on-the-ground observations.
As a history professor at a college in Oklahoma, he had several books to his credit, including “Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt and Depression,” which was published in 1979.
While never completely abandoning his interest in history, Bonnifield decided to pursue a life of railroading on Colorado’s Western Slope. He was based in the nearby railroad community of Phippsburg for 25 years while working as a conductor on trains from Grand Junction to Denver before retiring in 2002. This writer became familiar with him when we met during the early 1990s at the Turntable, a railroad restaurant located adjacent to newspaper offices of The Vail Trail in Minturn. Both of us were regulars there for awhile.
At one time, far more trains traveled through Yampa, he said. A train from northwest Colorado, for example, delivered coal to a plant along the South Platte River near downtown Denver. That plant, Arapahoe Station, ceased electrical production in 2014. Trains also delivered coal from northwest Colorado to Texas.
Now, maybe one train a month exports coal out of the Yampa Valley. One train a week may travel through the town ferrying wheat and other goods from northwestern Colorado and delivering pipes and other supplies.
But the valley no longer has a maintenance crew and other railroad employees like it once did. As for the diner for railroad employees, it has had trouble finding enough local help to maintain reliable hours.
At the same time, local governments will enormously suffer from the eroded tax base if the mine closes.
These grants are an expression of Colorado’s commitment to ease coal-dependent communities economically as the era of coal, now more than 125 years old in Colorado, ebbs even more rapidly through the end of this decade. By 2031, the state’s remaining last eight coal-fired electricity-generating plants will be closed, casting doubt on the viability of Colorado’s six remaining coal mines.
The legislative roots were in 2019, when Colorado adopted what was then seen as ambitious—too ambitious, in the minds of at least some Republican legislators—decarbonization goals: 50% economy-wide decarbonization by 2030 and 90% by 2050, both compared to 2005 levels. The law was HB 19-1261.
In HB 19-1314, Colorado legislators declared that they did not want to throw coal workers in the mines, power plants, or on the railroad under the energy transition bus. Colorado had been mindful of impacts, the law said, and state government had a role in helping provide a transition for those people and their communities.
The state, Colorado’s law declared, had a “moral commitment to assist the workers and communities that have powered Colorado for generations” by supporting a “just and inclusive transition” away from coal.
It also noted that resources existed at neither the state nor federal levels sufficient to assist workers and communities impacted by the transition. That included the absence of coordinated leadership within Colorado’s state government.
The law appropriated a thin sum for staffing, not quite $157,000, with the understanding that more would come. Wade Buchanan, a veteran of several state positions, was hired to run the new Office of Just Transition.
Meetings in early March 2020 were held in Craig and Hayden. I attended all three. In Craig that first evening, I heard anguish and dismay about the announcement two months before by Tri-State Generation and Transmission that the three coal units it operated there would all be closed by 2030. Only one had been announced previously.
The third day, the governor arrived in Craig. First he toured a small shop, Good Vibes, that produces gear for river boaters. It was just the governor by himself with the two co-owners and me the observer.
That afternoon, he sat in the Hayden Town Hall listening to testimony when the news arrived. One coal miner from Twentymile pleaded with the governor to see a future that included coal. Polis seemed to be listening, but likely he had been told just a few hours before that Colorado had its first case of covid. Surely, he was thinking many thoughts.
Colorado put together a 20-page action plan by the end of 2020 that outlined 13 strategies for communities, workers, and funding. It also gained state funding.
Between the Office of Just Transition and its parent agency, the Office of Economic Development & International Trade, $9.62 million in funding in the form of coal transition community grants had been issued. They were:
Yampa Valley, $5,152,538
West end of Montrose County (Nucla and Naturita), $3,058,192
Pueblo County, $471,423
Morgan County, $471,423
$471,423 for Delta, El Paso, Gunnison, La Plata and Larimer counties collectively
So, money is getting distributed, lots and lots of meetings are being held now, and the Office of Just Transition is no longer a one-man office, as it was for the first year.
Antlers began operating in 1904, shortly before the rails of what many called the Moffat Road arrived. The principle figure in the railroad was David Moffat, whose name lingers on the tunnel through the Continental Divide, the county in northwest Colorado — and the street on which this business is located. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Yampa’s main street, Moffat Avenue, is wide and still largely without pavement. It has never had a large population, hovering between 300 and 400 in recent decades. None of the busyness of Steamboat Springs 40 miles to the north, or the Vail Valley communities, 40 miles to the south, can be found in Yampa. To most locals, that’s fine.
Still, a little more activity would also suit the locals, and that is how the town intends to use the money, to bolster business activity. Part of that plan is to ensure that the community has a restaurant open to the public on a year-round, not just seasonal basis.
Yampa has had a very fine restaurant called Antlers. The business was established in 1904, just before the rails arrived from Denver through the Moffat Tunnel on their way to Moffat County, and has been in operation continuously since then with the exception of 2005-2009.
The restaurant has now returned to operating hours year-round with some help from the town government.
The opening of Yampa Garage Eatery is another bright spot in the town’s economic story. The money will also help expand the space and variety of goods at the local grocery store and mercantile.
But 90% of the town’s workers leave to work elsewhere, points out Mary Alice Page-Allen, the town planner and treasurer.
The goal of her work, she said, is to “retain what we have, but also to expand and attract.” The town core lies just a block off the highway, but for many travelers, there may be no particular reason to pause on their journeys.
Oak Creek, a one-time coal-mining town 10 miles to the north, which Page-Allen formerly managed, has had some success in creating more buzz in its commercial district. It even has a parking problem a couple days a week.
That’s a hard problem to imagine for Yampa, but a few more cars on that big, broad street would be welcome.
Colorado and Wyoming are collaborating to support a regional team working to power innovative pathways toward climate resiliency by utilizing data, predictive modeling and cutting edge technology to address key challenges. The Colorado-Wyoming Regional Innovation Engine (CO-WY Engine) is one of 16 finalists in the first-ever National Science Foundation (NSF) Regional Innovation Engines Competition, which will award up to $160 million in funding over the next ten years.
Officials in both states recognize the opportunity to secure federal funding that will transform the region into a national leader in developing climate-resilient and sustainable technologies and expand economic opportunities and workforce development in these key areas.
To elevate the CO-WY Engine, Colorado and Wyoming have both committed to align resources that will support the Engine’s goals, including increased engagement of the business community with the region’s research institutions and Federal Labs; attracting more funding to support the commercialization and monetization of new technologies; and growing diversity within the region’s workforce to include rural communities.
“We are thrilled to partner with Wyoming on this plan as Colorado is leading our country on environmental tech to help address climate challenges. This funding will grow the work of our universities and federal labs while creating more jobs,” said Gov. Jared Polis.
“The pathway to a prosperous global future will be paved with adequate, affordable energy and a rigorous commitment to a healthy environment,” Gov. Gordon said. “Wyoming understands the urgency of addressing climate challenges. Our unequaled leadership in innovating and developing needed technologies supports Wyoming’s all-of-the-above energy strategy. This approach will grow our economy, develop our workforce and support thriving communities.”
The CO-WY Engine, spearheaded by Innosphere Ventures, looks to transform the region into a leader in the development and commercialization of climate-resilient and sustainable technologies. These technologies will support communities across the region and the country to monitor, mitigate and adapt to climate impacts. They are expected to have direct applications to water resource management, agriculture technology, and extreme weather, including wildfires and flooding.
“We can solve so many climate-related challenges with technology-driven solutions, and NSF funding will dramatically increase what we can accomplish,” said Mike Freeman, CEO of Innosphere Ventures and lead of the CO-WY Engine’s proposal to the NSF. “We are pleased to have the support of both Colorado and Wyoming, which have such a strong history of collaboration and share our commitment to creating an inclusive, nationally and internationally relevant Engine that employs a diverse workforce and benefits rural and urban communities alike.”
Among the initiatives being explored by Colorado and Wyoming, the Wyoming Business Council, Wyoming Venture Capital, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, and Colorado’s Venture Capital Authority are assessing the possibility of a venture capital fund or funds that will invest in startups commercializing technologies that emerge from the CO-WY Engine.
These commitments build upon existing collaboration between the two states, including a four state Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with New Mexico and Utah to create the Western Inter-State Hydrogen Hub to advance a regional hydrogen economy. Colorado and Wyoming have also signed an MoU outlining the states’ commitments to explore the development of direct air capture to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“Across the Midwest and Mountain States, Wyoming and Colorado rise to the top as one of only a handful of regions that have the talented workforce, collaborative business ecosystem, and research and development capabilities to become a national leader in developing climate resilient technologies. NSF funding will accelerate that growth exponentially, and we are committed to working with Colorado to seize this opportunity,” said Josh Dorrell, CEO of the Wyoming Business Council.
“In Wyoming, Colorado has found a nimble partner equally committed to growing a strong, diversified economy, engaging urban and rural communities alike, and leveraging our regional strengths to create new commercial opportunities that also create climate resiliency. Elevating shared priorities and resources like a regional venture capital fund will directly support the development of the CO-WY Engine as a national and global leader in climate-resilient technologies,” said Eve Lieberman, OEDIT Executive Director. The NSF Engines program envisions supporting multiple flourishing regional innovation ecosystems across the U.S., spurring economic growth in regions that have not fully participated in the technology boom of the past few decades.The NSF is expected to announce successful Regional Innovation Engines this fall.
Early analyses show global warmth surged far above previous records in September — even further than what scientists said seemed like astonishing increases in July and August. The planet’s average temperature shattered the previous September record by more than half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the largest monthly margin ever observed. Temperatures around the world last month were at levels closer to normal for July according to separate data analyses by European and Japanese climate scientists. September’s average temperature was about 0.88 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above 1991-2020 levels — or about 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal from before industrialization and the widespread use of fossil fuels.
Xcel Energy building in downtown Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
A lot of money, of course, and a lot of new transmission in and around metropolitan Denver. What else is there in this package?
What an exciting time for Colorado.
We’re reinventing energy at a brisk pace that puts us in the front tier of states engaged — and also guiding — this necessary and critical transition.
And now we have specifics of what our largest electrical utility, Xcel Energy, with 1.6 million customers, prefers to do in meeting expanding demands for electricity while complying with a raft of state laws adopted beginning in 2019.
“This plan is transformational,” says Xcel in its filing from Monday night with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Yep.
You can download the report, “Our Energy Future: Destination 2030” Or go to the PUC e-files in proceeding 21A-0141E and look for Public 2021 ERP & DCEP.. There are several dozen related documents in the docket.
You’ve probably read the about this in the Denver Post or elsewhere. Lots of statistics. The most important one in 184 pages of statistics is this:
Xcel expects to be at 80% to 85% emissions-free energy by 2030. That not just a reduction as compared to 2005 levels. The law adopted in 2019 required it to achieve 80% reduction. This plan, if adopted and executed, goes higher. This is more than reduction. It goes roughly 10% higher.
The company says it can deliver this with a rate impact of about 2.25% annually. This compares with the projected rate of inflation of 2.3% during the remainder of the 2020s.
Too much? Well, Xcel does look out after its own financial interests. Robert Kenney, the president of Xcel’s Colorado division, made the case for reward for capital invested in an exchange Tuesday night with self-appointed and dedicated Xcel watchdog Leslie Glustrom at Empower Hour.
“I do believe we have seen the investor-owned utilities (around the country) spur innovation for nascent technologies into maturity,” said Kenney, who before his arrival in Colorado in June 2022 spent seven years with PG&E in California and, before that, as a PUC commissioner in Missouri for six years.
Xcel is moving boldly with the $14 billion in energy investments identified in this plan, but it may not even be the most impressive feat in Colorado. Holy Cross still says it expects to be at 100% emissions-free energy by 2030. And Tri-State, too long the epitome of a drag-your-feet G&T, is not terribly far behind — if it can keep its members. But that’s another story.
Xcel was reluctant to go forward with its first major wind farm, completed in 2004, but now has much wind — and will add far more in the next few yeas. Photo near Cheyenne Wells, Allen Best
Keep in mind, this is not just fuel switching. It’s also fuel expansion. We will need double or triple the electricity as we electrify buildings and transportation. We’ve barely begun.
This is on top of population expansion within metro Denver, the primary market for Xcel Energy. Xcel projects increased demand (called load, in the terminology of electrical providers) at 300 megawatts by 2026.
Xcel’s report notes that the population growth in the Denver metro area has consistently outpaced the national rate in every decade since the 1930s.
That said, much in Xcel’s preferred plan was unsurprising. It lays out a broad program for 6,545 megawatts of new renewable projects, broken down in this way:
3,400 megawatts for wind;
1,100 megawatts of solar;
1,400 megawatts of solar combined with storage;
19 megawatts of biomass (forest trees at a plant in Hayden);
600 megawatts of standalone storage.
And to think, aside from the 340-megawatt Cabin Creek pumped-storage hydro at Georgetown, Colorado’s largest battery storage facility last winter was still only 5 megawatt-hours (at the Holy Cross project between Glenwood Springs and Basalt).
This year, Xcel has added 225 megawatts of battery storage to Front Range locations. That was the result of a 2016 resource plan. These things do take time.
Xcel said it proposes six times more storage as compared to its contemplation earlier in this process — a result directly of incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
That federal package also delivers other benefits. It will, says Xcel, bring “billions of dollars in federal support to Colorado.” It estimates $10 billion in IRA benefits to customers.
Big investment in transmission
Transmission figures prominently in this plan.
PUC commissioners last fall approved the Power Pathway Project, a $1.7 billion string of high-voltage transmission lines looping 560 miles from near the Pawnee power plant at Brush and around the eastern plains and back to the Front Range. Construction began in June.
Xcel says its “existing transmission system is capable of reliably serving our customers today, but the energy transition cannot be accomplished with only minor changes to the transmission system.”
This plan proposes an additional $2.82 billion in transmission investments.
Part of that is the May Valley-Longhorn extension from the May Valley substation north of Lamar to Baca County, in the state’s southeastern corner. The 50-mile extension, called Longhorn — as most everything is called in the Springfield area — would cost $252 million. It figures prominently in Xcel’s plans because, as this report explains, Xcel finds the wind to be of low cost and its characteristics complementary to wind in other locations.
“Wind generation in the southeast portion of Colorado exhibits materially different generation patterns and will thus be a useful improvement to our system in adding geographic diversity to our overall renewable generation portfolio.”
Or, to paraphrase what I heard from locals in a visit there last week: the wind always blows in Baca County. They can describe the different winds with the expertise that a wine connoisseur might apply to various vintages.
Xcel says the Longhorn transmission extension will deliver 1,206 megawatts of wind. It also says that this wind will save the company – and hence consumers – a great deal of money: $282 million.
That deserves a wow!
However, if that Baca County wind were excluded, there would be more solar and storage.
The San Luis Valley also stands to get transmission upgrades. Appendix Q in the filings says this:
“The area has rough, remote, and challenging geography and weather, significant permitting issues due to a patch work of state and federal land use designations (conservation easements, U.S. Forest Service-managed land, National Park Service managed lands, and multiple state-protected areas).”
Electrical deliveries arrive almost entirely via three transmission lines crossing Poncha Pass. The valley residents are served by both Xcel and by Tri-State members. Both utilities have tried to create solutions since a 1998 study identified the problems. Some Band-Aids have helped.
Xcel proposes to spend $176 million to improve the situation in the San Luis Valley. Additional transmission would also open the door to development of new solar.
Most surprising to me — likely because I do not read the filings on the PUC dockets religiously – is how much Xcel believes it needs to spend in metro Denver: $2.146 billion.
It justifies the expense with this explanation.
“The company’s analysis shows that a new phase of the transition is emerging – reliably managing power transmission within and around the metropolitan area,” says the report. (Page 33).
“Delivery of remote resources is still an important consideration of transmission planning, as evidenced by the critical role that the CPP (Colorado Power Pathway) plays in enabling the preferred plan. However, as the company moves toward a grid powered primarily by renewable resources, and less reliant on legacy urban power plants, transmission investments are increasingly focused on enhancing the capacity and resiliency of the entire transmission grid —including those parts of the grid located closest to our customers’ homes and businesses.”
Why so much money for transmission upgrades in metro Denver? In part, says Xcel, it’s because of the lack of bids for resources within the metro area. The report and an accompanying appendix do not discuss reasons why the company failed to get those close-in resources.
That takes us to natural gas —and the related issue of how well Xcel can meet peak demands caused by extreme weather. The environmental community has been insistent that Xcel needs to reduce or eliminate its investment in natural gas generation. Xcel has maintained that natural gas must remain part of the equation, at least in this planning period, because alternatives have not yet been firmed up.
The company proposes to have 628 megawatts of capacity. This, it says, will solve the “reliability and resiliency variables” of a hot period in the summer of 2028.
In short, Xcel has to prepare for hot summers and cold winters. The base case is a hot spell in July 2022 and Winter Storm Uri of 2021. At both times, renewables underperformed. (I might have thought reference cases to a much hotter time of the future would have been used, but maybe I’m missing something).
What enables Xcel to meet the peak demands for cooling or heating? It could add on even more proven storage, altogether 3,700 megawatts worth, and over 13,000 megawatts of renewables, but at a cost of $5.4 billion more than this plan.
Instead, Xcel sees natural gas being the answer. The company emphasizes modeling that shows the new 400 megawatts of natural gas-created electricity will be needed only 5% of the time. Most of the time, they will sit idle. But, when needed, some can ramp up in a matter of 2 to 10 minutes, others as long as 30 minutes. This compares with coal plants, which mostly took 18 hours to ramp up.
Xcel is proposing a reserve margin of 18%. That’s how much capacity it plans on top of what it thinks it needs. All utilities have some reserve margins.
Game changers in next few years?
Storage is a major component of this part of this Xcel pivot and energy transition story altogether.
“The availability of cost-competitive utility-scale storage is reducing, but not eliminating, the need for new carbon emitting capacity resources – namely in inclement weather and during long-duration high-load situations,” says Xcel.
Will we get a break-through that will change the narrative?
Xcel plans a demonstration project at Pueblo that it expects to get underway in late 2024 to test the efficacy of a new storage technology called iron-rust that the developers believe can store energy for up to 100 hours. Along with its partner, Form Energy, it received a $20 million grant in April from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst. This week, Xcel announced a grant of up to $70 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. Both grants are to be split between the Pueblo project and a parallel project in Minnesota.
If this proves out, does this change the ball game, largely eliminating the need for natural gas?
Xcel nods at this question, pointing to modeling results that “Highlighting the need for further advancements in technology and a more diverse portfolio of resources may be needed to help economically reach our clean energy goals in the future.”
It also talks about using fuels other than natural gas – think hydrogen and ammonia and biogas —in these plans.
This natural gas component will be the most hotly disputed element of the Xcel plan—as it has been for the last two years.
Also raising my eyebrows in this 120-day report:
New technologies
A recent Colorado law sought to nudge utilities into accelerating new technology. The rule-making by the PUC in regard to this Section 123 provision specified that the resources must be “new, innovative, and not commercialized technology, and provide unique, scalable and beneficiation attributes as to future costs, emissions, reduction, or reliability benefits.” “Wind, solar or lithium-ion based battery storage,” concluded the PUC, do not qualify.
Xcel solicited bids and got a variety of proposals, including:
a plant in the San Luis Valley that could burn a variety of clean fuels including hydrogen and ammonia;
a hydrogen fuel cell project near Brush that would use salt-storage caverns to deliver 10-hour storage;
a 5-megawatt geothermal power plant in Weld County that would mine the 135 degree C (275 degrees F) non-potable water found deep underground.
Xcel found all of these proposals from bidders wanting for one reason or another. However, that’s not a solid no in all the cases, the company added.
Xcel Energy proposes a small biomass at Hayden, site of the current Hayden Generating Station. It says skill sets can transition relatively easily. Photo/Allen Best
Biomass at Hayden
The company proposes a 19-megawatt biomass plant at Hayden, burning dead trees from northwest Colorado to produce electricity. Colorado has an existing biomass plant at Gypsum, which is a little smaller, 11.5 megawatts, in capacity. It burns wood from as far away as the Blue River Valley between Silverthorne and Kremmling.
Workforce transition
The company points out that it has closed 18 generating units across its service territory during the last 15 years without any forced workforce reductions.
It says it will leverage natural attrition and worker retirements, and the remaining workers will be “up-skilled to operate and maintain the new clean energy assets or, if they choose, relocated and or transited and reskilled into another job.”
For example, it says, workers at the Hayden coal-burning plant have 80% of the skills, on average, needed to operate and maintain a biomass unit. The company says it will work with the biomass unit vendor, Colorado Northwestern Community College, and others to identify the additional training needed.
Pueblo solicitation
As part of its plans for Pueblo, where the Comanche 3 coal-burning plant is scheduled for retirement by 2031, Xcel plans to solicit bids that will fill out what the company needs in that final segment of 2028-2030.
The projects need to help out Pueblo County economically, even though Xcel has already committed to paying taxes on Comanche 3 in lieu of its operation until 2040.
Will it be nuclear? Xcel has not ruled out nuclear, but neither does it see nuclear as an option for 2030.
Xcel Energy Colorado’s CEO Kenney, in his remarks at Empower Hour, said the company sees small modular reactors and related technology under development as having promise.” But, he added, “It is unlikely such technologies will be trued up on a timeline to replace Comanche 3. But it will absolutely be a technology that we will continue to explore.”
Social cost of carbon
The planning considerations for this are so much more complex than those of the past. Decisions must be filtered through the social cost of carbon and also the social cost of methane. There are considerations about disproportionately impacted communities. And, as noted above, we have “just transition” as a consideration.
The simile of a triathlon race
Such documents are not ordinarily noted for their literary flourishes, and this one is no exception. But it must be noticed that aa simile found on page 62 is worth calling out:
“Getting to this point is like training to get to the starting line of a triathlon. We are excited, we have a support team at the ready, we understand the challenges, and we are looking forward to taking them on with a good plan in place. But that does not mean that implementation and execution of the plan will be easy, and unknown challenges lie ahead given the breadth of generation and transmission development contemplated by this plan.”
Colorado Green, located between Springfield and Lamar, was Colorado’s first, large wind farm. Photo/Allen Best
The climate crisis is no longer a looming threat – people are now living with the consequences of centuries of greenhouse gas emissions. But there is still everything to fight for. How the world chooses to respond in the coming years will have massive repercussions for generations yet to be born.
In my book How to Save Our Planet, I imagine two different visions of the future. One in which we do very little to address climate change, and one in which we do everything possible.
This is what the science suggests those very different realities could look like.
Year 2100: the nightmare scenario
The 21st century draws to a close without action having been taken to prevent climate change. Global temperatures have risen by over 4°C. In many countries, summer temperatures persistently stay above 40°C. Heatwaves with temperatures as high as 50°C have become common in tropical countries.
Every summer, wildfires rage across every continent except Antarctica, creating plumes of acrid smoke that make breathing outdoors unbearable, causing an annual health crisis.
Most mountain glaciers have completely melted. Skiing is now a predominantly indoor sport which takes place on giant artificial slopes. Most of the Himalayan plateau’s ice has disappeared, reducing the flows of the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Yamuna rivers which over 600 million people rely on for plentiful water.
The extra heat in the ocean has caused it to expand. Combined with water from melting ice sheets, sea levels have risen by more than one metre. Many major cities, including Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro and Miami, are already flooded and uninhabitable. The Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and many other small island nations have been abandoned.
Many coastal and river areas are regularly flooded, including the Nile Delta, the Rhine valley and Thailand. Over 20% of Bangladesh is permanently under water.
Winter storms are more energetic and unleash more water, causing widespread wind damage and flooding each year.
South-east Asian monsoons have become more intense and unpredictable, bringing either too much or too little rain to each region, affecting the lives of over three billion people.
Fish stocks have collapsed. The acidity of the ocean has increased by 125%. The ocean food chain has collapsed in some regions as the small marine organisms that form its base struggle to make calcium carbonate shells and so survive in the more acidic waters.
This is what our planet could look like if we do everything in our power to contain climate change.
Global temperatures rose to 1.5°C by 2050 and remained there for the rest of the century. Fossil fuels have been replaced by renewable energy. Over a trillion trees have been planted, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the industrial revolution.
Cities have been restructured to provide all-electric public transport and vibrant green spaces. Many new buildings have a photoelectric skin which generates solar energy and green roofs which cool the cities, making them a more pleasant place to live. High-speed electric trains reaching 300 mph link many of the world’s major cities. Intercontinental flights still run, using large and efficient planes running on synthetic kerosene that’s made by combining water and carbon dioxide sucked directly from the atmosphere.
Urban life must become greener, with cleaner air and zero-carbon public transport. Yyama/Shutterstock
Global diets have shifted away from meat. Farming efficiency has greatly improved during the transition from industrial-scale meat production to plant-based sustenance, creating more land to rewild and reforest.
Half of the Earth is dedicated to restoring the natural biosphere and its ecological services. Elsewhere, fusion energy is finally set to work at scale providing unlimited clean energy for the people of the 22nd century.
Two very different futures. The outcome your children and grandchildren will live with depends on what decisions are made today. Happily, the solutions I propose are win-win, or even win-win-win: they reduce emissions, improve the environment and make people healthier and wealthier overall.
Crews set up a workover rig June 3, 2022, in the Salt Creek oil field where CO2 from ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek facility was injected for enhanced oil recovery. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Backed by the promise of billions in federal dollars, energy companies are lining up to accept an invitation by Wyoming officials to collect industrial sources of carbon dioxide and pump it deep underground.
Essentially, the vision is to build a new low-carbon energy industry that scrubs the planet-warming gas from fossil fuels, keeping those fuels in the energy mix and simultaneously helping to address the climate crisis in a way that pays dividends to developers and the state.
Wyoming, according to Gov. Mark Gordon and other state officials, is primed to launch the industry. Not only has the state spent years testing its subterranean capacity to permanently store carbon dioxide, it has devoted more than a decade to building a legal and regulatory framework to win the federal government’s approval. Only Wyoming and North Dakota have won primacy over the federal program to permit such activities.
Now, the state’s top environmental regulator is considering the first in what many expect to be a wave of permit applications to drill the deep wells necessary to launch the new industry.
This schematic depicts how carbon dioxide from industrial sources might be collected for geologic sequestration. (Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality)
“Since 2010 [Wyoming has] been working on how to ensure this particular program could get off the ground and be protective of the environment with a lot of the risks that are involved with these kinds of projects,” said Lily Barkau, natural resources program manager at the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.
The agency is soliciting public comments on three carbon dioxide injection well permit applications submitted by Frontier Carbon Solutions. Two more “Class VI” permits are under review at the agency, but not yet ready for public feedback.
Sequestering CO2
Industry and regulatory officials eagerly note that pumping carbon dioxide underground isn’t fantasy. For decades, oil and gas developers have pumped the gas into oilfield formations to squeeze out more oil. Wyoming even has a “backbone” carbon dioxide pipeline that delivers the gas from southwestern and central Wyoming to multiple oilfields in the northeast corner of the state and into Montana.
While Wyoming still hopes to expand “enhanced oil recovery” via carbon dioxide injection, officials are also eager for companies to pump the gas deeper underground into saline formations. Here, at depths of 10,000 to 15,000 feet, carbon dioxide — compressed into liquid form — can be pumped and stored permanently, according to state and industry officials.
Assurances that the gas will remain underground are based on seismic surveys and deep geologic testing conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources.
There are skeptics, however, and many questions about the logistics of deep carbon dioxide “sequestration,” as well as whether all of the public resources invested are justified.
Skepticism and questions
So far, capturing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks — be they attached to trona processing plants, cement factories or coal-fired power plants — hasn’t proven economical at large scale. However, industry officials point to the federal 45Q tax credit — which was expanded under the Inflation Reduction Act — for vastly improving the economics of carbon capture and storage.
Gov. Mark Gordon and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan met with University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources officials Aug. 9, 2023 in Laramie. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Until industrial facilities in the southwest region of the state — including in corners of Colorado and Utah — are fitted with carbon capture, Frontier Carbon Solutions plans to collect its carbon dioxide from a “direct air capture” project still in development.
Other questions remain:
How will facilities such as direct air capture farms get carbon-free power without sprawling renewable energy development on sensitive landscapes?
How much will it cost to safely manage highly saline water displaced by carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations?
And, is all the time and public resources merely a distraction from proven renewable energy and the declining costs of installing wind and solar energy?
“Billions of dollars have been wasted trying to prove that this technology is real,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, told the Associated Press in May. “And all we have to show for it are a series of spectacular failures.’’
Projects under review
Texas-based Frontier Carbon Solutions is a partner in the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub project in southwest Wyoming. The effort is part of the federal CarbonSAFE Initiative led by the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources, which won $40.5 million in support from the U.S. Department of Energy. UW and Frontier Carbon Solutions will contribute another $10.1 million to the project for a total of $50.6 million, according to DOE and university officials.
The “storage hub” will have a minimum storage capacity of 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over the life of the project — about 20 years, according to Frontier Carbon Solutions. For context, Wyoming’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from industrial fossil fuel consumption — excluding motor vehicle pollution — was 54.6 million metric tons in 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The company is seeking three permits under the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s Underground Injection Control program. Public comment closes Oct. 19.
Click here for more information about the company’s permit applications. Comments can be submitted electronically via DEQ-online portals for each of the three permits: permit 242, permit 243 and permit 244. Comments may also be submitted by mail to: Ms. Lily Barkau, P.G., Groundwater Section Manager, Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, Water Quality Division, 200 West 17th Street, 2nd Floor, Cheyenne, WY 82002.
DEQ will also hold a public hearing on the Class VI well permits, with dates yet to be announced. If the permits are approved, the company will still have to submit more information from initial drilling activities before DEQ can grant Frontier Carbon Solutions a permit to actually inject carbon dioxide, Barkau said.
Tallgrass Energy is also seeking a Class VI injection well permit for its Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub in Laramie County. That permit is not yet up for public comment. However, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is seeking public comment regarding the company’s application for rights-of-way on federal surface in Laramie County.
This diagram depicts how CO2 is injected deep underground for geologic storage. (U.S. Department of Energy)
Public comment has been extended to Oct. 10. More about the project and how to comment can be found on the BLM’s project website.
Tallgrass was awarded $4.1 million for the project from the Wyoming Energy Authority in 2022, which the company will match in full, according to the agency. The grant comes from a $10 million legislative appropriation for carbon capture, storage and utilization projects.
First round of carbon dioxide injection permitting
The state won authority over the program after more than a decade of legislation to establish a legal and regulatory framework to allow for the geologic storage of carbon dioxide.
That framework includes settling the question of who owns the underground “pore space” where carbon dioxide will be stored. The state declared it belongs to the surface estate, which clarifies who gets paid for use of the pore space and who is liable. The state also set out to appease potential developers by giving them an opportunity to transfer their liability for carbon dioxide injections to the state if they meet post-closure requirements intended to protect water and human health, according to Barkau.
Wyoming, with primacy over the federal Class VI injection well permitting program, can shave years off the permitting process, Barkau said. And that makes Wyoming an attractive place to launch carbon dioxide storage projects.
“I think we’ve been able to prove that if the operator is willing to work collaboratively, it can be done in a very expedited time frame and still meet all of the rules and regulations and be protective of human health and the environment,” Barkau said.
About 10 years ago, a very thick book written by a French economist became a surprising bestseller. It was called “Capital in the 21st Century.” In it, Thomas Piketty traces the history of income and wealth inequality over the past couple of hundred years.
The book’s insights struck a chord with people who felt a growing sense of economic inequality but didn’t have the data to back it up. I was one of them. It made me wonder, how much carbon pollution is being generated to create wealth for a small group of extremely rich households? Two kids, 10 years and a Ph.D. later, I finally have some answers.
In a new study, colleagues and I investigated U.S. households’ personal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2019. We previously studied emissions tied to consumption – the stuff people buy. This time, we looked at emissions used in generating people’s incomes, including investment income.
If you’ve ever thought about how oil company CEOs and shareholders get rich at the expense of the climate, then you’ve been thinking in an “income-responsibility” way.
While it may seem intuitive that those getting rich from fossil fuels bear responsibility for the emissions, very little research has been done to quantify this. Recent efforts have started to look at emissions related to household wages in France, global consumption and investments of different income groups and billionaires’ investments. But no one has analyzed households across a whole country based on the emissions used to generate their full range of income, including wages, investments and retirement income, until now.
We linked a global data set of financial transactions and emissions to microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly labor force survey, which includes respondents’ job, demographics and income from 35 categories, including wages and investments. People’s wages we connected to the emission intensity of the industries that employ them, and we based the emissions intensity of investment income on a portfolio that mirrors the overall economy.
The results of our analysis were eye-opening, and they could have profound implications for producing more effective and fair climate policies in the future.
A view from the top 1%
Both our consumption- and income-based approaches reveal that the highest-earning households are responsible for much more than an equitable share of carbon emissions. What’s more surprising is how different the level of responsibility is depending on whether you look at consumption or income.
In the income-based approach, the share of national emissions coming from the top 1% of households is 15% to 17% of national emissions. That’s about 2.5 times higher than their consumer-related emissions, which is about 6%.
In the bottom 50% of households, however, the trend is the exact opposite: Their share of consumption-based national emissions is 31%, about two times larger than their income-based emissions of 14%.
Why is that?
A couple things are going on here. First, the lowest earning 50% of U.S. households spend all that they earn, and often more via social assistance or debt. The top income groups, on the other hand, are able to save and reinvest more of their income.
Second, while high-income households have very high overall spending and emissions, the carbon intensity – tons of carbon dioxide emitted per dollar – of their purchases is actually lower than that of low-income households. This is because low-income households spend a large share of their income on carbon-intensive basic necessities, like home heating and transportation. High-income households spend more of their income on less-carbon-intensive services, like financial services or higher education.
Implications for a carbon tax
Our detailed comparison could help change how governments think about carbon taxes.
Typically, a carbon tax is applied to fossil fuels when they enter the economy. Coal, oil and gas producers then pass this tax on to consumers. More than two dozen countries have a carbon tax, and U.S. policymakers have proposed adding one in recent years. The idea is that raising the price of these products by taxing them will get consumers to shift to cheaper and presumably less carbon-intensive alternatives.
But our studies show that this kind of tax would disproportionately fall on poorer Americans. Even if a universal dividend check was adopted, consumer-facing carbon taxes have no impact on saved income. Generating that income likely contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, but as long as the money is used to buy stocks rather than consumables, it is excluded from carbon taxes. So, this kind of carbon tax disproportionately affects people whose income goes primarily toward consumption.
A profit-focused carbon tax
What if, instead of focusing on consumption, carbon taxes addressed greenhouse gases as an outcome of profit generation?
The vast majority of American corporations operate under the principle of “shareholder primacy,” where they see a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for their investors. Products – and the greenhouse gases used to make them – are not created for the benefit of the consumer, but because the sale of those products will benefit the shareholders.
If carbon taxes were focused on shareholder income linked to greenhouse gas emissions rather than consumption, they could target those receiving the most economic benefits resulting from these emissions.
The impact
A couple of interesting things might result, particularly if the tax was set based on the carbon intensity of the company.
Corporate executives and boards would have incentive to reduce emissions to lower taxes for shareholders. Shareholders would have incentive, out of self-interest, to pressure companies to do so.
Investors would also have incentive to shift their portfolios to less-polluting companies to avoid the tax. Pension and private wealth fund managers would have incentive to divest from carbon-polluting investments out of a fiduciary duty to their clients. To keep the tax focused on large shareholders, I could see retirement accounts being excluded from the tax, or a minimum asset threshold before the tax applies. https://www.youtube.com/embed/CgA0UgSEDjI?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jared Starr explains the new study’s findings and the implications.
Revenue generated from the carbon tax could help fund adaptation and the transition to clean energy.
Instead of putting the responsibility for cutting emissions on consumers, maybe policies should more directly tie that responsibility to corporate executives, board members and investors who have the most knowledge and power over their industries. Based on our analysis of the consumption and income benefits produced by greenhouse gas emissions, I believe a shareholder-based carbon tax is worth exploring.
Dave Marston has written a profile of friend of Coyote Gulch Allen Best. Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (David Marston):
Usually seen with a camera slung around his neck, Allen Best edits a one-man online journalism shop he calls Big Pivots. Its beat is the changes made necessary by our rapidly warming climate, and he calls it the most important story he’s ever covered.
Best is based in the Denver area, and his twice-a-month e-journal looks for the radical transitions in Colorado’s energy, water, and other urgent aspects of the state’s economy. These changes, he thinks, overwhelm the arrival of the telephone, rural electrification and even the internal combustion engine in terms of their impact.
Global warming, he declares, is “the biggest pivot of all.”
Whether you “believe” in climate change — and Best points out that at least one Colorado state legislator does not — there’s no denying that our entire planet is undergoing dramatic changes, including melting polar ice, ever-intensifying storms, and massive wildlife extinctions.
A major story that Best, 71, has relentlessly chronicled concerns Tri-State, a wholesale power supplier serving Colorado and three other states. Late to welcome renewable energy, it’s been weighed down with aging coal-fired power plants. Best closely followed how many of its 42 customers — rural electric cooperatives — have fought to withdraw from, or at least renegotiate, contracts that hampered their ability to buy cheaper power and use local renewable sources.
Best’s first newspaper job was at the Middle Park Times in Kremmling, a mountain town along the Colorado River. He wrote about logging, molybdenum mining and the many miners who came from eastern Europe. His prose wasn’t pretty, he says, but he got to hone his skills.
Because of his rural roots, Best is most comfortable hanging out in farm towns and backwaters, places where he can listen to stories and try to get a feel for what Best calls the “rest of Colorado.” Pueblo, population 110,000 in southern Colorado, is a gritty town he likes a lot.
Pueblo has been forced to pivot away from a creaky, coal-fired power plant that created well-paying jobs. Now, the local steel mill relies on solar power instead, and the town also hosts a factory that makes wind turbine towers. He’s written stories about these radical changes as well as the possibility that Russian oligarchs are involved in the city’s steel mill.
In 2015, signs supporting coal were abundant in Craig, Colo. Photo/Allen Best
Best also vacuums up stories from towns like Craig in northwestern Colorado, home to soon-to-be-closed coal plants. He says he finds Farmington, New Mexico, fascinating because it has electric transmission lines idling from shuttered coal power plants.
His Big Pivots may only have 1,091 subscribers, but story tips and encouragement come from some of his readers who hold jobs with clout. His feature “There Will Be Fire: Colorado arrives at the dawn of megafires” brought comments from climate scientist Michael Mann and Amory Lovins, legendary co-founder of The Rocky Mountain Institute.
“After a lifetime in journalism, his writing has become more lyrical as he’s become more passionate,” says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company. “Yet he’s also completely unknown despite the quality of his work.”
Among utility insiders, and outsiders like myself, however, Best is a must-read.
His biggest donor has been Sam R. Walton’s Catena Foundation — a $29,000 grant. Typically, supporters of his nonprofit give Big Pivots $25 or $50.
Republican River in Colorado January 2023 near the Nebraska border. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Living in Denver allows him to be close to the state’s shot callers, but often, his most compelling stories come from the rural fringe. One such place is the little-known Republican River, whose headwaters emerge somewhere on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. That’s also where Best’s grandfather was born in an earthen “soddie.”
Best grew up in eastern Colorado and knows the treeless area well. He’s written half a dozen stories about the wrung-out Republican River that delivers water to neighboring Kansas. He also sees the Eastern Plains as a great story about the energy transition. With huge transmission lines under construction by the utility giant Xcel Energy, the project will feed renewable power from wind and solar to the cities of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.
Best admits he’s sometimes discouraged by his small readership — it can feel like he’s speaking to an empty auditorium, he says. He adds, though, that while “I may be a tiny player in Colorado journalism, I’m still a player.”
He’s also modest. With every trip down Colorado’s back roads to dig up stories, Best says he’s humbled by what he doesn’t know. “Just when I think I understand something, I get slapped up the side of the head.”
Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.
Just for grins here’s a gallery of Allen’s photos from the Coyote Gulch archives.
Top photo, Vestas located a factory to produce wind turbines in Pueblo in 2010 and has added other renewable energy elements even as the coal-burning units have begun to retire. Photo credit: Allen Best
The Thunder Wolf Energy Center east of Pueblo, near Avondale, has 100 megawatts of battery storage. Credit: Big PivotsRebecca Mitchell. Photo credit: Allen BestPhoto credit: Allen Best/Big PivotsThe Yampa River emerging from Cross Mountain Canyon in northwest Colorado had water in October 2020, but only the second “call” ever was issued on the river that year. Photo/Allen BestOn May 17, Rabbit Ears Pass still had plentiful snow for Muddy Creek, a tributary to the Colorado, and for the Yampa River tributaries. Photo/Allen BestByron Kominek on a February afternoon at the site of his late grandfather’s farm, which he calls Jack’s Solar Garden. Photo/Allen BestThis canal in the South Platte Valley east of Firestone, north of Denver, could conceivably also be a place to erect solar panels without loss of agricultural productivity. Photo/Allen BestCanal in the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big PivotsSnow blankets buildings and all else in Steamboat Springs. The larger of the two ski areas there had received as much snow by mid-January ad it did all of last season. Photo/Allen Best
Bill McKibben, right, conferring with Land Institute founder Wes Jackson at the 2019 Prairie Festival, has strongly motivated many, including some CRES members. Photo/Allen BestIrrigation in the San Luis Valley in August 2022. Photo/Allen BestNorthern Colorado on July 9, 2021, sunset with Longs Peak in the background. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big PivotsHorizontal sprinkler. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big PivotsA turbine whirls on a farm east of Burlington, Colo. Colorado’s eastern plains already have many wind farms—but it may look like a pin cushion during the next several years. Photo/Allen BestSan Juan Mountains December 19, 2016. Photo credit: Allen BestVail has begun methodically removing grass from its parks from areas that serve little purpose, partly with the goal of saving water. Buffehr Creek Park after xeriscaping. Photo: Town of Vail Glen Canyon Dam, December 2021. Credit: Allen BestYampa River. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town NewsSaguache Hotel. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town NewsSkyline Drive at night Cañon City. Photo credit: Vista Works via Allen Best/The Mountain Town NewsThe proposal would have Xcel continue tax payments to Pueblo and Pueblo County until 2040.Drilling rigs along the northern Front Range in 2013. Photo/Allen Best
Sunrise over Golden, Colorado. Photo credit Terry Smith via The City of Golden.
Click the link to read the article on the Ark Valley Voice website (Jan Wondra). Here’s an excerpt:
The month of July 2023 just ended. It is in the record books as the hottest month in the history of the world while humans have been around; or at least in the past 120,000 years or so. It will obliterate the record for the hottest recorded month, upping the record by a formerly unheard of potential 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, according to a report from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization and the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, it was hotter this past month than anything we’ve seen in the last 80 or so years. But then again, humans only have data for about 100 years or so; an era considered the “sweet spot” in planet livability for humans.
This past month is the latest in a string of records that have made the past nine years the hottest in the history of our planet. Anyone who can read data knows we’re in trouble. On July 27, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres made an urgent speech in New York warning that the only surprise is the speed of climate change, saying “Climate change is here, it is terrifying and it is just the beginning.” He declared that “the era of global boiling has arrived.” Add to the extreme heat, the extreme weather that feels as if it is all happening at once, and we could be forgiven for wondering what on earth is going on. The answer is that ‘on earth”, we humans continue to screw it up, pumping billions of particles of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere; fueling an accelerating climate crisis.
In the ultimate irony, as the temperatures have surged across the affluent parts of the world, people there are cranking up their air conditioning — creating an endless cycle of climate disruption.
KARACHI: The month of July has rewritten the record books as it stands out as the hottest month ever on a global scale. Unrelenting heat waves have sizzled large swathes of Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia, leaving countries grappling with severe weather conditions. From Puerto Rico to Pakistan, Iran, India, and all the way to Siberia, climate records have not just been shattered, but smashed.
In June more than 4.7 million hectares of land in Canada were scorched by wildfires, painting skylines an eerie shade of orange over Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, where a dense haze obstructed views of the CN Tower, a 553.3-meter-tall iconic landmark that dominates the downtown skyline of one of Canada’s largest cities. However, this was not just Canada’s problem; billowing smoke traveled across continents, reaching as far as Europe, serving as a wake-up call for everyone trying to ignore the climate crisis and its far-reaching consequences.
A month later, all efforts were concentrated on dousing blazes raging on the Greek islands of Evia and Corfu, in addition to Rhodes, where wind-whipped infernos forced the government to evacuate more than 19,000 tourists and residents. The scars left behind by these fires are all too visible. Many towns in Greece were left with a severe shortage of water because of the damage to their resources. According to the country’s weather Institute, Greece faced the longest heatwave in its history, with its hottest July weekend in 50 years, with the mercury rising in some parts up to 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).
To leading scientists, none of this comes as a surprise. The likely trajectory of climate change, given the current global performance on emissions reduction, has been spelled out repeatedly by climate experts, and their cries have been falling on deaf ears for quite some time. While warming caused by greenhouse gases is not unexpected, seeing some of the climate records being broken was not anticipated. The global average temperature has been rising, and in July this year, it broke through 17 degrees for the first time. Furthermore, the record for the hottest day on earth fell not just once but three times in a week. And it is not just the land that is warmer; the oceans, which take up most of the world’s heat, have also witnessed unprecedented temperatures.
A scorcher has settled over the entire Southwestern United States, with highs expected to hit the triple digits for several days in a row from Bakersfield to Las Vegas to Grand Junction. Phoenicians will be doing the Summer Solstice Swelter during that long day and short night—the minimum temperature is sticking at just below 90 degrees, to give even those used-to-be-cool predawn hours an ovenlike ambience.
That type of heat can cause the human body to go haywire, short-circuiting the renal system, causing the brain to swell, blood pressure to drop, heart-rate to increase, blood clots to form. Last year this heat-caused cascading failure proved fatal for more than 300 people in greater Phoenix.
Heat-associated deaths by year in Maricopa County, Arizona. Source: Maricopa County Public Health.
Now, the electricity grid is not a living organism, but it can behave like one in a variety of ways. And just as excessive heat can ripple through the vital organs of the body, so too can it trigger chain reactions and feedback loops in the power system that keeps society churning along. Which is why during heatwaves like this one—that threatens to drag on in varying degrees of intensity throughout the summer—the power often goes out, right when folks need it most to keep their homes habitable.
To continue with the body metaphor, the grid has a heart, made up of all of the generators such as power plants and wind farms and so forth; a circulation system made up of arteries (high voltage transmission lines) and capillaries (distribution lines that carry power to your home or business); and organs, or the electricity consumers. The supply of power generated must always be equal to the collective demand. If demand kicks up, then the grid operators (the brain) have to increase the output of the “heart” accordingly.
In the West, we get our power from the Western Interconnect, which is actually broken up into about 38 separate grids, each with its own heart and brain and organs.
On a summer’s afternoon, as the temperature rises, thermostats signal air-conditioners to start running in order to keep homes and businesses comfortable and—in some cases—survivable. Cooling space requires a lot of energy. A 2013 study found that during extreme heat events, about half of all electricity use goes toward space-cooling of some sort. So when some 18 million residential AC units, plus all of the commercial units, kick in across the West, it increases the demand—or load—on the respective electricity grids significantly.
Some of that sudden increase in demand is offset by a corresponding uptick in solar generation, if available on the grid, and wind power—assuming the wind’s blowing at the time. The problem is, solar generation tends to peak in the early afternoon, but temperatures—and therefore AC-related demand—peak a few hours later. Grid operators need to turn to other resources in order to match that late afternoon peak.
Probably the best source of “peaking” power is a hydroelectric dam, which is essentially a big battery in that it stores energy in the form of water that can be run through turbines to generate power at the flip of a switch. Except, well, in the hottest, driest years, just when that hydropower is most needed, hydroelectricity is in short supply thanks to shrinking reservoirs.
Meanwhile, the nuclear reactors that are currently in service can’t be ramped up or down to “follow the load.” The same goes for coal power plants. Still, those sources provide important baseload, a fairly constant stream of power. Yet many thermal power plants run less efficiently when the ambient temperature is high, and nearly all of them—whether nuclear, coal, or natural gas (steam, not turbine)—need billions of gallons of water per year for cooling and steam-generation purposes, another problem during drought. And the warmer that water is, the less effective it is: Nuclear plants have been forced to shut down because the cooling water is too warm.
Since grid operators have no control over wind or solar generation and there aren’t enough batteries online yet, they have little choice but to turn to natural gas peaker plants, which can be cranked up quickly but are also expensive to run and emit more pollutants than conventional plants, including greenhouse gases that warm the climate and exacerbate heat waves and drought. Sometimes even that’s not enough to meet demand and grid operators must “shed load,” or do rolling power outages.
But usually all that power being pumped out of the giant, multi-generator heart of the grid is sent across the deserts in high-voltage transmission lines, where we once again run into heat-related problems: Power lines work less efficiently in high heat, causing them to sag, break, and come into contact with vegetation, which can ignite wildfires. And wildfires, in turn, can bring down transmission lines, thereby triggering chain reactions that can ripple through the entire grid and kill power—and air conditioning—for millions.
And that smoke? It’s not so good for solar power: Smoke from wildfires was so thick last summer that it blotted out the sun and diminished solar power generation in California, which meant grid operators had to scramble to make up for the loss.
Even when the power does make it to the air conditioners without triggering disasters, troubles remain. Air conditioners work by pulling heat from indoors and blowing it outside, as anyone who has walked past an AC vent when its running has experienced. Multiply that phenomenon by hundreds of thousands and you’ll get an increase in nighttime temperatures and exacerbate the urban heat island effect, according to a study by an Arizona State University researcher. Not only are the emissions from generating power to run the air conditioners heating things up, but so is running the air conditioners, themselves.
And heat doesn’t affect everyone equally. Various studies have found that heat disproportionately affects people of color and those who live in lower-income neighborhoods. That’s in part because those neighborhoods don’t have as many trees or green-spaces, which mitigate the urban heat islands. And it’s also due to the fact that they are less likely to be able to afford air conditioning equipment or the electricity to run them. It’s just another way in which wealth inequality ripples throughout society, creating health inequality, quality of life inequality, opportunity inequality, and so forth.
The first priority is to help the people who are most affected by the heat and the resulting grid failures, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions so as not to exacerbate the heat even further. And we need to pursue solutions for the grid, by installing more batteries and energy storage, breaking down the divisions between the balkanized grids in the West, expanding transmission in some places to enable moving clean power across big distances so that solar and wind from the Interior can match up with California’s demand peak, while also focusing on micro-grids for fire-prone areas and rooftop solar paired with batteries—for everyone, not just the wealthy—so that the grid becomes somewhat redundant.
It’s a massive challenge, but we have to take it on before it’s too late.
***
And on the lighter side, please witness comedian Blair Erskine’s impression of a spokesperson for the Texas grid:
Vestas located a factory to produce wind turbines in Pueblo in 2010 and has added other renewable energy elements even as the coal-burning units have begun to retire. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
Every transition produces winners and losers. U.S. fiscal policy shifted in the 1880s and the economy of Aspen cratered for decades. Some silver-mining towns never recovered. In the 1980s, newspapers were plentiful. Ink now stains far fewer printers and editorial wretches. Amazon thrives but Sears and Kmart, no more.\
How will Colorado’s coal-based towns transition as we quell emissions from energy production? Legislation of recent years seeks to deliver what lawmakers call a just transition, meaning that Pueblo, Craig and other coal-based communities will stay on their feet.
The newest round of job-producing investments in emission-free technologies, though, call into question how difficult that will be. Two new factories are to be created in Brighton, on metropolitan Denver’s northeastern fringe. The combined investment of $450 million will deliver more than 1,200 average- to better-paying jobs.
VSK Energy will manufacture solar photovoltaic panels and will employ more than 900 people. It is a direct result of incentives in the federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which seeks to restore U.S. manufacturing of renewable energy components.\
The second factory will produce a new generation of energy-rich lithium-ion batteries. The company, Amprius Technology, says that a new anode, which will use silicon mined in Montana, will double the range of a Tesla, allowing it more than enough capacity to roam Colorado from corner to corner and the ability to juice up to 80% capacity in six minutes. The company also says the new batteries will deliver value to drones and aircraft. Sounds like a game-changer.
Both companies cited proximity to Interstate 76 as a significant consideration in siting their factories. They also have proximity to I-25, I-70 and I-80 plus Denver International Airport. If of not immediate importance, they also have access to transcontinental rail lines.
Availability of a large, skilled workforce was also cited. The battery company also cited the proximity of the Colorado School of Mines and other universities. It will employ a half-dozen Ph.Ds. in the research facility associated with the factory.
Something more intangible was also in play. It was described as a “strong cultural fit” by Ashwini Agarwal, the leader of Vikram Solar, the parent company for the solar manufacturer. Supply chains matter, but Colorado’s initiative in accelerating the energy transition also matters.
Andrew Huie, the vice president of infrastructure for Amprius, said something similar. “Colorado and Gov. Polis are embracing clean energy, and batteries align with Colorado’s clean energy goals,” he told me. “There may be synergies.”
This warehouse ion Brighton, once the distribution center for Sears and Kmart and most recently as a storage location for Costco appliances, is to become home to a lithium-ion battery factory. Rezoning to light industrial will first be necessary. Photo/Allen Best
Other companies are also carving out futures in this new energy economy along the Front Range. The Denver Business Journal recently cited three companies from Denver to Fort Collins that hope to stake a future with new batteries. And Lightning eMotors manufactures electric vehicles in Loveland.
Brighton already has Vestas, which arrived in 2010 to manufacture nacelles, containing the gearboxes and drive trains for wind turbines. Vestas also built a factory in Pueblo, near the Comanche Generating Station.
CS Wind, now the owner of the Pueblo factory, this year began an expansion that will add 850 jobs. It cited Inflation Reduction Act provisions that encourage wind production.
Jeffrey Shaw, president of the Pueblo Economic Development Corporation, said he expects announcement of other renewable-sector projects in the Pueblo area and probably throughout the state during the next 12 to 18 months. “A lot of it has to do with the Inflation Reduction Act,” he said, and in particular the law’s buy-American provision.
Already, Pueblo County has been rapidly adding both solar and storage. But so far, the new tax base for Pueblo won’t balance that from Comanche. Xcel Energy, Comanche’s primary owner, has agreed to pay taxes until 2040.
Western Slope towns dependent on coal extraction and combustion are a harder sell. At Craig, there was hope on becoming a hydrogen hub, but Colorado has pinned its highest hope for federal funding on a project involving Rawhide, the coal but soon to become gas plant near Brush. Nuclear has its fans in Craig and beyond, and the Economist notes that the Biden administration is dangling billions in financial incentives nationally. That same magazine also concludes that unresolved problems cloud the future of this technology.
As for new factories, Craig is 90 miles from the nearest interstate, at the end of a railroad and five hours from DIA. It does have a workforce with skills, but so far, no new applications for those skills.
At Nucla and Naturita, which losy their small coal plant in 2019, the challenge is even greater.
Maybe Craig, Hayden, and the other towns will figure out new careers by working with the state and the utilities. But maybe not.
On Tuesday [May 2, 2023], New York lawmakers passed a law that, for the first time, authorizes the New York Power Authority — the largest state public power authority in the U.S. — to build renewable energy projects to help reach the state’s climate goals.
The new Build Public Renewables Act, passed as part of New York’s annual budget, is a culmination of four years of organizing by climate and community organizations, and has been heralded as a major win by energy democracy, environmental justice, and labor groups.
“This will enable us to build renewable energy projects with gold-standard labor language, ensuring that the transition to renewable energy benefits working people and their families,” Patrick Robbins, an organizer with the grassroots Public Power NY Coalition, told Grist.
The new law directs the New York Power Authority to plan, construct, and operate renewable energy projects in service of the state’s renewable energy goals. Under New York’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, the state aims to generate 70 percent of its electricity from renewables and cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030.
The Build Public Renewables Act includes several provisions to prioritize clean energy access for low- and middle-income customers, organized labor, and a just transition for workers displaced from fossil fuel projects. It requires the New York Power Authority to establish a program allowing low- and moderate-income electricity customers in disadvantaged communities to receive credits on their monthly utility bills for any renewable energy produced by the power authority.
The new law also stipulates that workers or contractors hired for these new renewable energy projects must be protected by a collective bargaining agreement. And it instructs the public power authority to enter into a memorandum of understanding with labor unions to uphold and protect pay rates, training, and safety standards for workers supporting the operation and maintenance of such projects. Candidates who have lost employment in the oil and gas sector will be prioritized for those positions. Beginning in 2024, the authority will also be authorized to allocate up to $25 million each year toward worker-training programs for the renewable energy sector.
Activists applaud a provision to phase out so-called peaker power plants owned by the New York Power Authority by 2030 and replace them with renewable energy systems. These small natural gas power plants quickly start and stop during times of peak energy demand, typically in the summer, when air-conditioning use ramps up. They are also a major source of pollution and sickness for nearby communities.
In a 2021 report, a coalition of state environmental justice groups found that 78 percent of residents living within one mile of the plants are either low income or people of color. The report also found that peaker plants contribute up to 94 percent of New York’s nitrogen oxide pollution, a key component of smog, on high-ozone days.
The law had been introduced — and failed to pass — the last two consecutive years before finally passing this year. New York state Assembly Member Sarahana Shrestha, elected this past November, was a key force in pushing the legislation through the state assembly. Before serving in the assembly, she was an organizer with the Public Power NY Coalition and the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, helping to rally around the Build Public Renewables Act. She ran on a climate campaignaligned with the public power movement, which aims to shift energy utilities from the traditional investor-owned, private model to public ownership and democratic governance.
To Shrestha, the new law addresses “fundamental questions like who should own energy, who should serve energy, at what cost, and what kind of energy should we be making, and who should be deciding those things.”
The bill prevailed despite opposition from groups including the Independent Power Producers of New York, a trade association of energy companies working in renewables and fossil fuels, and the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a coalition of renewable energy businesses.
In a joint letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the two organizations and four other groups stated that having the public power authority build renewables “does not create a level playing field with the private sector.” They also raised concerns that the law does not address ongoing barriers to clean energy development in New York, such as delays in connecting to transmission systems and permitting.
Proponents of the law argue that industry resistance was outweighed by broad support from community-based organizations, environmental justice groups, and unions representing more than 1 million workers in New York.
Another factor in the law’s successful passage was last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate spending legislation. The federal law provides newly expanded tax credits for renewables and makes them available to tax-exempt public power entities like the New York Power Authority.
Shrestha and other advocates hope that the new Build Public Renewables Act will inspire similar legislation in other states — and they’re already seeing local Democratic Socialists of America chapters and other advocacy groups reach out.
“The reason I am excited about this win is not because our work is done, but now it means we can start our work,” Shrestha said.
Denver, Colorado, USA – January 12, 2013: The Suncor Energy refinery in Denver, Colorado. Based in Calgary, Alberta, Suncor Energy is a Canadian oil and gas company with revenues of over 35 Billion Canadian Dollars. Photo credit: City of Boulder
Boulder County’s case to proceed in local court; stage set for similar cases across US
The United States Supreme Court delivered a critical victory to those suffering the harms of the climate crisis. The Court rejected ExxonMobil and Suncor’s petition for certiorari seeking to force three Colorado communities — who sued the companies for their role in the climate crisis and the local impacts the communities suffer — into federal court. The result of the Supreme Court’s denial is that the cases brought by Boulder County, San Miguel County, and the City of Boulder will proceed in Colorado state court.
In June 2022, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit decided that the case belonged in state court, the companies sought Supreme Court review on two questions – whether federal common law actually governed the municipalities’ state law tort claims and whether federal courts thus have jurisdiction over the case. With the Supreme Court rejecting their petition, Exxon and Suncor can no longer forestall Colorado state courts’ consideration of the case. The cases will now proceed in the Colorado court system.
The Supreme Court also rejected petitions in four similar climate cases where the fossil fuel companies pressed the same arguments for federal jurisdiction. More than two dozen similar cases were filed in state courts across the country. Other high-profile climate litigation cases include those in Rhode Island, Baltimore, Hawai’i, and several California municipalities.
EarthRights General Counsel Marco Simons issued the following statement:
“Since the Colorado communities filed this case in 2018, ExxonMobil and Suncor have consistently sought to delay the litigation—moving the case from court to court and losing each step along the way. Today’s development brings these communities one step closer to holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their misconduct and obtaining remedies for the serious climate harms Colorado residents face.
“Every court that has reviewed this case has come to the same conclusion–that it should be heard in a local court, by a local jury. The Supreme Court’s decision today confirms that. This case is not about changing national climate policy — it’s about accountability for the climate harms in Colorado that companies like Exxon and Suncor are responsible for.”
Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann issued the following statement:
“Boulder County is thrilled by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to take up this case. Our lawsuit against Exxon and Suncor should be determined in Colorado state court – where the actions of these companies are negatively impacting our residents. Communities like ours are exposed to destructive climate change impacts caused by the actions of fossil fuel companies while they reap record profits. These companies need to pay their fair share to deal with the climate chaos they’ve created and take responsibility for the climate impacts. Local governments cannot shoulder the price tag of climate change alone.”
The City of Boulder issued the following statements:
“Today, the court affirmed what we know to be true – our case deserves its day in local court, where our communities experience the impacts and costs of climate change,” said Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett. “Oil companies are making record profits while our planet continues to warm. It’s only fair that the companies that profit from irresponsible actions compensate communities for the harm they cause.”
“There’s no doubt that climate change is very costly for local government. Taxpayer dollars are stretched to support key services, and the costs to prepare for and recover from climate disasters are too much for communities alone to bear,” said Boulder City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde. “Today’s decision is a step toward justice. Colorado communities will have the chance to hold oil companies responsible for the hundreds in millions in damages their actions cause.”
San Miguel County Commissioner Hilary Cooper issued the following statement:
“This is excellent news for San Miguel County. It’s only fair that our lawsuit against Suncor and Exxon be heard not before the U.S. Supreme Court but in Colorado, closer to the communities where the impacts of climate change are most acutely felt. Enough with the delays. It’s time for fossil fuel companies to help local governments with the costs of addressing climate change in the name of protecting the health and well-being of our residents.”
Background:
In 2018, Boulder County, San Miguel County, and the City of Boulder—with legal support from EarthRights International, the Hannon Law Firm, and the Niskanen Center—filed a lawsuit against Exxon and Suncor for their decades of misinformation and other contributions to the climate crisis. The communities, which are already experiencing significant climate change impacts, demanded that these companies pay their fair share of the costs associated with these impacts so that the costs do not fall disproportionately on taxpayers.
Shortly after the communities filed their case in Colorado state court, defendant fossil fuel companies sought to remove the case to federal court. Both the federal district court and Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the case should proceed, as filed, in state court. However, the Tenth Circuit needed to revisit this jurisdictional issue after the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in BP v. Baltimore.
In February 2022, the Tenth Circuit ruled that the Colorado climate case should indeed proceed in state, not federal, court. Defendants ExxonMobil and Suncor then filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear the case and answer two narrow questions related to federal removal jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s initial reaction was to ask the U.S. Government for its views; in March 2023, the Solicitor General submitted a brief agreeing with the Colorado communities that the Supreme Court should not hear the case and that it should proceed in state court.
Representation of the Colorado communities at the Supreme Court has been led by Kevin Russell of Goldstein, Russell & Woofter LLC.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Theo Stein):
Levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide, the three greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to climate change, continued their historically high rates of growth in the atmosphere during 2022, according to NOAA scientists.
The global surface average for CO2 rose by 2.13 parts per million (ppm) to 417.06 ppm, roughly the same rate observed during the last decade. Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. 2022 was the 11th consecutive year CO2 increased by more than 2 ppm, the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases in the 65 years since monitoring began. Prior to 2013, three consecutive years of CO2 growth of 2 ppm or more had never been recorded.
The Global Monitoring Division of NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory has measured carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for several decades at a globally distributed network of air sampling sites. Credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory
Atmospheric methane, which is far less abundant but much more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, increased to an average of 1,911.9 parts per billion (ppb). The 2022 methane increase was 14.0 ppb, the fourth-largest annual increase recorded since NOAA’s systematic measurements began in 1983, and follows record growth in 2020 and 2021. Methane levels in the atmosphere are now more than two and a half times their pre-industrial level.
This graph shows the globally-averaged, monthly mean atmospheric methane abundance determined from marine surface sites since the inception of NOAA measurements starting in 1983. (Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory)
In 2022, levels of the third-most significant anthropogenic greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, rose by 1.24 ppb to 335.7 ppb, which is tied with 2014 as the third-largest jump since 2000 and a 24% increase over its pre-industrial level of 270 ppb. The two years of highest growth occurred in 2020 and 2021. Increases in atmospheric nitrous oxide during recent decades are mainly from use of nitrogen fertilizer and manure from the expansion and intensification of agriculture.
This graph shows the globally-averaged, monthly mean atmospheric nitrous oxide abundance determined from marine surface sites since 2001. (Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory)
“The observations collected by NOAA scientists in 2022 show that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming pace and will persist in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” said Rick Spinrad, Ph.D., NOAA administrator. “The time is now to address greenhouse gas pollution and to lower human-caused emissions as we continue to build toward a Climate-Ready Nation.”
NOAA’s measurements vital for understanding emissions trends
NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory collected more than 14,000 air samples from monitoring stations around the world in 2022 and analyzed them in its state-of-the-art laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Every spring, NOAA calculates and releases the preliminary global average levels of the three primary long-lived greenhouse gases — CO2, methane and nitrous oxide — observed during the previous year.
Measurements are obtained from air samples collected from sites in NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, which includes more than 50 cooperative sampling sites around the world.
“Our latest measurements confirm that the most important greenhouse gases continue to increase rapidly in the atmosphere,” said Stephen Montzka, NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory senior scientist. “It’s a clear sign that much more effort will be required if we hope to stabilize levels of these gases in the next few decades.”
Carbon dioxide emissions remain the biggest problem
CO2 is by far the most important contributor to climate change. The main driver of increasing atmospheric CO2 is the burning of fossil fuels, with emissions increasing from 10.9 billion tons per year in the 1960s — which is when the measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii began — to about 36.6 billion tons per year in 2022, according to the Global Carbon Projectoffsite link, which uses NOAA’s greenhouse gas measurements in its estimates.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times and studies indicate offsite linklarge forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.
About a quarter of the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to date have been absorbed by the world ocean, contributing to ocean acidification, which may threaten some fisheries and aquaculture around the world.
Cause of methane increases not fully known
NOAA’s long-term measurements show that atmospheric methane increased rapidly during the 1980s, nearly stabilized in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, then resumed a rapid rise in 2007.
A 2022 study by NOAA and NASA scientistsoffsite link suggests that as much as 85% of the increase from 2006 to 2016 was due to increased microbial emissions generated by livestock, agriculture, human and agricultural waste, wetlands and other aquatic sources. The rest of the increase was attributed to increased fossil fuel emissions.
The exact causes of the recent increase in methane are not yet fully known, said GML carbon cycle scientist Lindsay Lan, a CIRESoffsite link scientist working at the Global Monitoring Laboratory. One possibility, she said, is the influence of a persistent three-year La Nina, which, on average, results in enhanced precipitation over tropical wetland regions, which may increase the activity of microbes that generate methane emissions as a result. NOAA scientists are investigating the possibility that climate change is causing wetlands to give off increasing methane emissions in a feedback loop.
Mountain of the Holy Cross
Creator: Jackson, William Henry, 1843-1942. View of Mount of the Holy Cross in the Sawatch Range, Eagle County, Colorado. Shows snow on a mountain peak, rocky ridges and talus. Date: 1892? Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
Glenwood Springs-based cooperative says it can leap from 50% emission-free energy to 92% by next year—despite owning a coal plant. Exactly how do this work? Is it a model for others?
Let’s start with the obvious. The sun doesn’t always shine and, except for springtime in Colorado, the wind doesn’t always blow.
So how can Holy Cross Energy, which serves the Vail, Aspen, and Rifle areas, achieve 92% emission-free energy in 2024? Last year it was 50%.
And if Holy Cross can do it, what is possible for utilities serving Crested Butte and Steamboat Springs, Holyoke and Crestone, Sterling and Pueblo?
By the way, Holy Cross still owns 8% of Colorado’s newest coal plant, Comanche 3.
Directors of Holy Cross several years ago adopted what seemed like the audacious goal of achieving 100% emissions-free power by 2030. Municipal utilities serving Aspen and Glenwood springs already have 100% renewables, but do not own their own generation.
I expected small steps. Wind and solar have become far less expensive than coal or gas. But what windless, sunless days?
Resource adequacy has become a major question in this energy transition. Coal plants, if sometimes down, are far more reliable than wind and sunshine. Now we’re hurriedly closing those high-priced and polluting plants. Natural gas can respond quickly to demand. However, those plants are costly and pollute, too.
Do we need more natural gas plants?
Colorado’s two largest electrical providers, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission, both say they can reduce carbon emissions 80% carbon by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels. But both have refrained from embracing higher, short-term goals.
Tri-State, which delivers power to 17 of the state’s 22 electrical cooperatives, warns of ambitions outpacing realities. Duane Highley, the chief executive, likens resource adequacy to a “big bad wolf.” The Western Energy Coordinating Council in December warned that Western states risked having insufficient resources by 2025 to meet electric demand on the grid they share.
Storage will be crucial. Lithium-ion batteries, if increasingly more affordable, can store electricity for just a few hours. We need technologies that can store energy for days if not weeks. Xcel Energy will be testing one such long-term technology, called iron-air, at Pueblo. Colorado wants to be part of the elusive answer to hydrogen, perhaps using existing electricity infrastructure at Brush or Craig. And transmission and other new infrastructure, such that could allow Colorado to exploit the winds of Kansas or the sunshine of Arizona, can help—but remains unbuilt.
Holy Cross actually has the second lowest electrical rates among Colorado’s 22 electrical cooperatives. And its rates are 5% less than those of Xcel. This is not Gucci electricity, a Tesla Model X Plaid. The Aspen Skiing Co. and Vail Resorts make snow with some of Colorado’s lowest electricity rates.
Holy Cross Energy owned 8% of Comanche 3 when the coal-burning unit at Pueblo began operations in 2010, when this photo was taken, and it still does. It has assigned output of the power to Guzman Energy. Photo/Allen Best
Bryan Hannegan, the chief executive and head wizard at Holy Cross, laid out his utility’s broad strategy in recent presentations to both state legislators and the Avon Town Council. Holy Cross, he explained, will add new wind from eastern Colorado and several new solar-plus-storage projects within its service territory.
The cooperative also intends to integrate new storage in homes and businesses. It incentivizes home batteries that can be tapped as needed to meet demand from neighborhoods. Holy Cross also wants to integrate vehicle batteries, such as from electric school buses, in its efforts to match demands with supplies. Time-of-use rates will be crucial. This market mechanism aims to shift demands to when renewable electricity is most readily available — and cheapest.
Importantly, Holy Cross expects to achieve this high mark without need of new natural gas capacity. Many environmentalists loathe the idea of new and rarely used – but always expensive – natural gas plants. Most utilities see even more gas generation as necessary.
Speaking to the Avon council, Hannegan expressed confidence Holy Cross can meet growing demand from electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other uses. He called it “smart electrification.”
Holy Cross’s journey from 92% to 100%, though, will “be a bit of a doozie,” he said. He likened it to the climb from Camp 4 on Everest to the peak.
“We have to think about how we balance (supply and demand) at every location on our grid at every moment of every day,” he said. That “fine-grained balancing” will be “quite an engineering challenge. There is reason we have given ourselves six years” to figure this out.
What about that coal plant that Holy Cross still owns? Does that muck up the math? Can Holy Cross truly claim 92% ? And what prevents other utilities from following in its footsteps? These are questions I will ask Holy Cross and others in coming weeks.
A global map using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing areas in orange and red where temperatures have been above the long-term average. Credi: University Of Maine
Click the link to read the article on The Guardian website (Graham Readfearn). Here’s an excerpt:
“The current trajectory looks like it’s headed off the charts, smashing previous records,” said Prof Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales…
According to the Noaa data, the second-hottest globally averaged ocean temperatures coincided with El Niño that ran from 2014 to 2016.
Credit: NOAA
The data is driven mostly by satellite observations but also verified with measurements from ships and buoys. The data does not include the polar regions. More than 90% of the extra heat caused by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and deforestation has been taken up by the ocean. A study last year said the amount of heat accumulating in the ocean was accelerating and penetrating deeper, providing fuel for extreme weather.
England, a co-author of that study, said: “What we are seeing now [with the record sea surface temperatures] is the emergence of a warming signal that more clearly reveals the footprint of our increased interference with the climate system.”
Wyoming’s largest utility will either retire or convert #coal-fired units to natural (#methane) gas, sparing only two coal-burning units in the state beyond 2030
Wyoming coal will play a shrinking role in PacifiCorp’s energy supply portfolio as the utility adds more wind and solar power and either retires or converts its coal-fired power units in the state to natural gas.
Only two of the utility’s 11 coal-fired power units currently operating in the state will continue burning coal beyond 2030 — Wyodak near Gillette and Unit 4 at the Dave Johnston plant in Glenrock — according to the utility’s biennial Integrated Resource Plan filed on Friday. Several coal units will be spared from earlier decommissioning plans and instead be converted to natural gas — Jim Bridger units 3 and 4 in 2030 and Naughton units 1 and 2 in 2026.
Dave Johnston Unit 3 will be retired in 2027, and units 1 and 2 will be retired in 2028 rather than 2027.
All told, PacifiCorp will cut its coal-fired power generation capacity across its six-state operating region by 1,153 megawatts by 2026 and 3,000 megawatts by 2032, and replace it with wind and solar energy, battery storage, nuclear power, wholesale power purchases and energy efficiencies, according to the company, which operates as Rocky Mountain Power in Wyoming.
PacifiCorp plans a major shift from coal to solar, wind, nuclear and battery storage. (PacifiCorp)
“Our Integrated Resource Plan is designed to determine the lowest-cost options for customers, adjusting for risks, future customer needs, system reliability, market projections and changing technology,” said Rick Link, who serves as PacifiCorp senior vice president of resource planning, procurement and optimization.
No carbon capture for coal
One option that doesn’t fit those parameters is retrofitting decades-old coal-fired power units with carbon capture, use and sequestration technologies. PacifiCorp also filed a mandatory report to the Wyoming Public Service Commission Friday to update officials on its call for bidders to possibly install CCUS facilities at its coal units in the state — an action mandated by Wyoming law.
“Through 2042, the [analysis] for all CCUS variants result in higher costs than the preferred portfolio,” PacifiCorp said in its 48-page report. The summary suggests it will cost Wyoming ratepayers “$514 million [to retrofit] Dave Johnston Unit 2, $857 million for Dave Johnston Unit 4, and $1.3 billion for Jim Bridger units 3 and 4.”
Of the 54 companies that PacifiCorp sought bids from, only 21 qualified and only three participated in mandatory site visits, PacifiCorp said. The bidding and analysis also confirmed that adding CCUS to an existing coal-fired power unit drastically reduces a facility’s generation capacity, which would require replacing that lost capacity.
PacifiCorp is still working with vendors to explore the potential for taking on CCUS retrofits, however.
Three of four coal-burning units at PacifiCorp’s Dave Johnston coal-fired power plant near Glenrock will be decommissioned by 2028, according to the utility’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
“The company has determined that Dave Johnston Unit 4 and Jim Bridger units 3 and 4 remain potentially suitable candidates for CCUS and are being further analyzed under the company’s RFP process approved by the [Wyoming Public Service Commission] in the initial application,” PacifiCorp said in its report.
CCUS retrofits remain a significant cost and power-delivery-reliability risk for Wyoming ratepayers, Powder River Basin Resource Council Chairman David Romtvedt said.
“Ratepayers should not be asked to cover the costs of uneconomical energy projects,” Romtvedt said in a prepared statement. “Instead, we support the addition of cost effective and environmentally responsible renewable energy sources to the company’s overall energy profile.”
Renewable shift and potential nuclear
PacifiCorp’s updated Integrated Resource Plan, which looks ahead 20 years, includes quadrupling its wind and solar resources to 20,000 megawatts by 2032, backed with an additional 7,400 megawatts of energy storage.
The utility still envisions taking ownership of TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear energy facility at Kemmerer — which is expected to begin operating in 2030 — and possibly taking on two more small modular reactors co-located at coal plants in Utah.
Utility giant PacifiCorp hopes to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. (PacifiCorp)
The expansion of renewable and low-carbon electric generation facilities is accompanied by approximately 2,500 miles of new transmission lines, many of which will connect Wyoming renewable sources to PacifiCorp service territories in the West. All told, the power shift and transmission buildout should result “in a system-wide 70% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, an 87% reduction by 2035 and a 100% reduction by 2050,” PacifiCorp reported.
Paramount to those greenhouse gas emission savings is curbing the utility’s reliance on coal.
“Driven in part by ongoing cost pressures on existing coal-fired facilities and dropping costs for new resource alternatives, of the 22 coal units currently serving PacifiCorp customers, the preferred portfolio includes retirement or gas conversion of 13 units by 2030 and 20 units by year-end 2032,” PacifiCorp said.
Though it remains to be seen how PacifiCorp’s shift away from coal and toward a lower-carbon energy portfolio will affect jobs and revenue in the state, the company’s plan acknowledges a larger energy industry shift and opportunities for the state, according to Romtvedt.
“Greater use of renewable energy will help us to ease the dislocation caused by the transition away from extractive resources while developing a more sustainable energy future that can support stable economies in our communities,” he said.
Delegates at the IPCC meeting in Interlaken, Switzerland, on 18 March 2023. Credit: IISD
Click the link to read the article on the Carbon Brief website (Aruna Chandra, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer, Simon Evans, Robert McSweeney, Ayesha Tandon, and Giuliana Viglione)
The final part of the world’s most comprehensive assessment of climate change – which details the “unequivocal” role of humans, its impacts on “every region” of the world and what must be done to solve it – has now been published in full by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The synthesis report is the last in the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle, which has involved 700 scientists in 91 countries. Overall, the full cycle of reports has taken eight years to complete.
The report sets out in the clearest and most evidenced detail yet how humans are responsible for the 1.1C of temperature rise seen since the start of the industrial era.
It also shows how the impacts of this level of warming are already deadly and disproportionately heaped upon the world’s most vulnerable people.
The report notes that policies in place by the end of 2021 – the cut-off date for evidence cited in the assessment – would likely see temperatures exceed 1.5C this century and reach around 3.2C by 2100.
In many parts of the world, humans and ecosystems will be unable to adapt to this amount of warming, it says. And the losses and damages will “escalate with every increment” of global temperature rise.
But it also lays out how governments can still take action to avoid the worst of climate change, with the rest of this decade being crucial for deciding impacts for the rest of the century. The report says:
“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
The report shows that many options for tackling climate change – from wind and solar power to tackling food waste and greening cities – are already cost effective, enjoy public support and would come with co-benefits for human health and nature.
At a press briefing, leading climate scientist and IPCC author Prof Friederike Otto said the report highlights “not only the urgency of the problem and the gravity of it, but also lots of reasons for hope – because we still have the time to act and we have everything we need”.
Carbon Brief’s team of journalists has delved through each page of the IPCC’s AR6 full synthesis report to produce a digestible summary of the key findings and graphics.
The synthesis report is the final part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle. It “integrates” the main findings of the three working group reports, which have been published over the last 18 months or so:
As the “mandate” was to produce a synthesis of existing material, “there is nothing that is in there that is not in the underlying reports”, author Prof Fredi Otto – a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London – told a press briefing. This means that the report does not include any research or emissions pledges issued after the cut-off date for the WG3 assessment – which was 11 October 2021, several weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
The synthesis report is much shorter than the full assessment reports. The combined length of the “summary for policymakers” (SPM) – a short, non-technical synopsis – and the underlying report clocks in at 122 pages. This is longer than the 42.5 pages that were planned (pdf), but a fraction of the assessment reports that can top 3,000 pages. As with the assessment reports, the synthesis report has been through several rounds of review by experts and governments.
The report’s SPM was signed off via a line-by-line approval session involving authors and government delegates last week in Switzerland.
However, unlike the assessment reports, the session also approved the underlying full report “section by section”. It was also the IPCC’s first approval session since the Covid-19 pandemic that was held in person.
The approval process was scheduled to be completed on Friday 17 March, but overran – despite multiple “night sessions” and “round-the-clock deliberations”. The SPM was finally approved on the morning of Sunday 19 March in a “sparsely attended room”, as many developing country delegates had already left the venue, Third World Network reported. “People who have to contribute have left the meeting,” said India’s representatives in the early hours before the closing plenary.
Once the SPM was approved, there was then a “huge moment of panic” around whether “it would at all be possible to do the approval of the long report”, Otto said:
“We all almost died of adrenaline poisoning during [Sunday], but then it was approved quite straightforwardly.”
(The Earth Negotiations Bulletin has published a summary of the discussions during the approval session. This is referenced frequently in this article.)
The synthesis report shares the IPCC’s “calibrated language” that the assessment reports use to communicate levels of certainty behind the statements it includes.
The findings are given “as statements of fact or associated with an assessed level of confidence”, based on scientific understanding. The language indicates the “underlying evidence and agreement”, the report explains:
“A level of confidence is expressed using five qualifiers: very low, low, medium, high and very high, and typeset in italics, for example, medium confidence.
“The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or result: virtually certain 99-100% probability; very likely 90-100%; likely 66-100%; more likely than not >50-100%; about as likely as not 33-66%; unlikely 0-33%; very unlikely 0—10%; and exceptionally unlikely 0-1%. Additional terms (extremely likely 95-100%; more likely than not >50-100%; and extremely unlikely 0-5%) are also used when appropriate.”
The synthesis includes projections based on the latest generation of global climate models, produced as part of the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) for the AR6 cycle. However, it also brings together different approaches for how future pathways were considered in the assessment reports.
The WG1 report “assessed the climate response to five illustrative scenarios based on Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) that cover the range of possible future development of anthropogenic drivers of climate change found in the literature”, the synthesis explains:
“The high and very high GHG emissions scenarios (SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5) have CO2 emissions that roughly double from current levels by 2100 and 2050, respectively. The intermediate GHG emissions scenario (SSP2-4.5) has CO2 emissions remaining around current levels until the middle of the century. The very low and low GHG emissions scenarios (SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6) have CO2 emissions declining to net-zero around 2050 and 2070, respectively, followed by varying levels of net-negative CO2 emissions.”
In contrast, the WG3 report assessed “a large number of global modelled emissions pathways…of which 1,202 pathways were categorised based on their projected global warming over the 21st century, with categories ranging from pathways that limit warming to 1.5C with more than 50% likelihood with no or limited overshoot (C1) to pathways that exceed 4C (C8)”.
The table below, taken from the synthesis report, shows how these pathways relate to the SSPs and their predecessors, the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs).
Description and relationship of scenarios and modelled pathways considered across AR6 working group reports. Source: IPCC (2023) Box SPM.1, Table 1
The synthesis report is the final product of the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle. Its delay from the planned publication in September last year for “management reasons” – and the lack of transparency surrounding these issues – resulted in “unusually blunt statements of discontent from governments” about the IPCC’s impact and credibility, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported at the time.
Nonetheless, governments agreed at a September meeting that the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle (AR7) will begin in July this year and will have a length of between five and seven years. The end of AR6 and the start of AR7 will see the election of a new IPCC leadership team – including chair, vice-chairs and working group co-chairs. The first full assessment reports of AR7 would likely not be expected until 2027 or 2028.
The SPM says with high confidence that human activities have “unequivocally caused global warming”.
2. How is the Earth’s climate changing?
This statement – first made in the IPCC’s WG1 report – is the strongest wording to date about the role of human activities on observed warming from any IPCC assessment cycle.
Overall, the report says that global surface temperature in 2011-20 averaged at 1.09C above 1850-1900 levels – with a 1.59C rise seen over land and a 0.88C rise over the ocean. It adds, with high confidence, that “global surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2000 years”.
According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, delegates “disagreed on how much information to include” in the SPM sub-paragraph on global surface temperature increases. The bulletin outlines the lengthy discussion needed to finalise this section of the text – including decisions on whether to use the “more precise” 1.09C or the rounded 1.1C figure and warnings that the addition of extra sentences “overloaded the sub-paragraph with numbers and diluted the message”.
The SPM also discusses the observed changes and impacts of climate change to date. It makes the following statement with high confidence:
“Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.”
It says that global average sea levels increased by 0.2 metres between 1901 and 2018. Sea level rise accelerated over this time, from a rate of 1.3mm per year over 1901-71 to 2.7mm per year over 2006-18, it adds.
The SPM for the AR6 synthesis report is longer than its AR5 counterpart (pdf) and contains more numbers in its section on observed changes in the climate system.
For example, the AR5 report does not quantify the rate of acceleration of sea level rise, instead saying that “the rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia (high confidence)”.
Meanwhile, the SPM says human influence has likely increased the chance of “compound” extreme events since the 1950s, including increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts.
The SPM has very high confidence that “increases in extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality and morbidity” in all regions. It adds that extreme temperatures also cause mental health challenges, trauma and the loss of livelihoods and culture. The report also has high confidence that climate change is “contributing to humanitarian crises where climate hazards interact with high vulnerability”.
India in 2022 faced a prolonged heatwave, with temperatures exceeding 42°C in numerous cities across the country. This came just weeks after India recorded its hottest March since the country’s meteorological department began its records over 120 years ago. This image, produced using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission, shows the land surface temperature across most of the nation. According to the India Meteorological Department, maximum air temperatures reached 43-46°C over most parts of Rajasthan, Vidarbha, Madhya Pradesh and East Uttar Pradesh; in many parts over Gujarat, interior Odisha; and in some parts of Madhya Maharashtra on 28 April. Forecasters warned that heatwave conditions are expected to continue until 2 May. Experts at the Indian Institute of Technology’s Water and Climate Lab stated that, in recent years, the number of Indian states hit by heatwaves has increased, as extreme temperatures become more frequent. Owing to the absence of cloud cover on 29 April (10:30 local time), the Sentinel-3 mission was able to obtain an accurate measurement of the land surface temperature of the ground, which exceeded 60°C in several areas. The data shows that surface temperature in Jaipur and Ahmedabad reached 47°C, while the hottest temperatures recorded are southeast and southwest of Ahmedabad (visible in deep red) with maximum land surface temperatures of around 65°C. The map was generated by using the mission’s Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer instrument. While weather forecasts use predicted air temperatures, this satellite instrument measures the real amount of energy radiating from Earth. Therefore, the map shows the actual temperature of the land’s surface pictured here, which is usually significantly hotter than air temperatures. Sentinel-3 can monitor wildfires, map the way the land is used, provide indices of vegetation state, as well as measure the temperature, colour and height of the sea surface. For more information on the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission, click here. By Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2022, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117497147
Elsewhere, the report has high confidence that animal and human diseases including zoonoses – infections that pass between animals and people – “are emerging in new areas” and very high confidence that “the occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases has increased”.
The SPM warns that climate and weather extremes are “increasingly driving displacement in Africa, Asia, North America (high confidence), and Central and South America (medium confidence), with small island states in the Caribbean and South Pacific being disproportionately affected relative to their small population size(high confidence)”.
The authors write that hot extremes have intensified in cities and that they have high confidence that the observed adverse impacts are “concentrated amongst economically and socially marginalised urban residents”.
The report elaborates, saying it has high confidence that “urban infrastructure including transportation, water, sanitation and energy systems have been compromised by extreme and slow-onset events, with resulting economic losses, disruptions of services and impacts to well-being”.
The table below shows observed changes in the climate and their attribution to human influence. Darker colours indicate a higher confidence in the changes and their human influence. Notably, the table lists “warming of the global climate system since pre-industrial times” as a “fact”.
Observed changes in the climate and their attribution to human influence. Darker colours indicate a higher confidence in the findings. Source: IPCC (2023) Table 2.1
The report has high confidence that climate change has hindered efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals by reducing food security, changing rainfall patterns, melting bodies of ice such as glaciers and driving more intense and frequent extreme weather events.
For example, the report says that “increasing weather and climate extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and reduced water security”. (For more on how climate change is affecting extreme weather, see Carbon Brief’s coverage of the IPCC’s WG1 report.)
The report also says that “substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses” have already been sustained. For example, it has very high confidence that approximately half of the species assessed globally have shifted polewards or to higher elevations. It has medium confidence that impacts on some ecosystems are “approaching irreversibility” – for example the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from glacial retreat.
The report also has high confidence that “economic impacts attributable to climate change are increasingly affecting peoples’ livelihoods and are causing economic and societal impacts across national boundaries”.
3. How are human-caused emissions driving global warming?
The report states as fact – that is, with no calibrated language – that “human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming”.
In other words, the report states, “human-caused climate change is a consequence of more than a century of net GHG emissions from energy use, land-use and land use change, lifestyle and patterns of consumption, and production”.
Specifically, the report explains that humans have contributed to 1.07C of the observed warming between 1850-1900 and 2010-19, with a likely range of 0.8-1.3C. As the total observed warming over the same period is 1.06C, this means that humans have caused 100% of the long-term global warming to date.
This conclusion is in line with the synthesis report (pdf) of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5), published in 2014, which said:
“The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over [1951-2010].“
That the influence of human activity is marginally larger than the observed temperature rise reflects the mix of impacts that an industrialised society is having. The warming impact of the GHGs that human activity has produced is likely to be in the range of 1.0-2.0C. But then there is also the cooling influence of other “human drivers (principally aerosols)”, the report notes.
Aerosols include tiny particles – such as soot – that are produced from cars, factories and power stations. They tend to have an overall cooling effect on the Earth’s climate by scattering incoming sunlight and stimulating clouds to form. These human drivers could have contributed to a cooling of 0.0-0.8C, the IPCC says.
The net cooling effect of human-caused aerosols “peaked in the late 20th century”, the report notes with high confidence.
Natural influences on the climate had only a small influence on the long-term trend in global temperature, the reports says, with fluctuations in the sun and volcanic activity causing between -0.1C and 0.1C of temperature change and other natural variability causing between -0.2C and 0.2C.
The increase in concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere since around 1750 “are unequivocally caused by GHG emissions from human activities over this period”, the IPCC says:
“In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations (410 parts per million) were higher than at any time in at least 2m years (high confidence), and concentrations of methane (1866 parts per billion) and nitrous oxide (332 parts per billion) were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years (very high confidence).”
The figure below shows “the causal chain from emissions to resulting warming of the climate system”. The bottom panel shows the increase in GHGs over 1850-2019, the middle panel shows the resulting rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, the top left panel shows the change in global surface temperature since 1850 and the top right panel separates the warming out into its different contributing factors.
The causal chain from emissions to resulting warming of the climate system. Panel (a) shows the increase in GHGs over 1850-2019. Panel (b) shows the resulting rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions. Panel (c) shows the change in global surface temperature since 1850. Panel (d) separates the warming out into its different contributing factors. Source: IPCC (2023) Figure 2.1
The report says with high confidence that “land and ocean sinks have taken up a near-constant proportion (globally about 56% per year) of CO2 emissions from human activities over the past six decades”. However, looking to the future, it adds:
“In scenarios with increasing CO2 emissions, the land and ocean carbon sinks are projected to be less effective at slowing the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere (high confidence).
“While natural land and ocean carbon sinks are projected to take up, in absolute terms, a progressively larger amount of CO2 under higher compared to lower CO2 emissions scenarios, they become less effective, that is, the proportion of emissions taken up by land and ocean decreases with increasing cumulative net CO2 emissions (high confidence).”
In 2019, global net emissions of GHGs clocked in at 59bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e), the report says. This is 12% higher than in 2010 and 54% higher than in 1990, with “the largest share and growth in gross GHG emissions occurring in CO2 from fossil fuels combustion and industrial processes followed by methane”.
The report says, with high confidence, that GHG emissions since 2010 have increased “across all major sectors”. It continues:
“In 2019, approximately 34% (20GtCO2e) of net global GHG emissions came from the energy sector, 24% (14GtCO2e) from industry, 22% (13GtCO2e) from AFOLU, 15% (8.7GtCO2e) from transport and 6% (3.3GtCO2e) from buildings.”
However, although average annual GHG emissions between 2010 and 2019 were “higher than in any previous decade”, the rate of growth during this period (1.3% per year) “was lower than that between 2000 and 2009” (2.1% per year), the report notes. This sentence – which also featured in the WG3 report – was added during the approval session at the request of China, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported.
Historical contributions to global GHGs “vary substantially across regions” and “continue to differ widely”, the authors note.
In 2019, around 35% of the global population were in countries emitting more than nine tonnes of CO2e per capita – excluding CO2 emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), the report says.
In contrast, 41% were in countries emitting less than three tonnes of CO2e. It adds that least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS), in particular, have much lower per-capita emissions (1.7 and 4.6 tonnes of CO2e, respectively) than the global average (6.9 tonnes), excluding CO2 from LULUCF.
Perhaps most starkly, the authors note with high confidence:
“The 10% of households with the highest per-capita emissions contribute 34-45% of global consumption-based household GHG emissions, while the bottom 50% contribute 13-15%.”
The regional variations in emissions are illustrated by the figure below, which shows historical contributions (top-left), per capita emissions in 2019 (top-right) and global emissions since 1990 broken down by emissions (bottom). (For more on historical responsibility for emissions, see Carbon Brief’s analysis from 2021.)
During the approval session, France – supported by around 15 other countries, including the US and Canada – requested that this figure was elevated into the SPM “to provide a clear and necessary narrative about the causes of warming”, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported. However, Saudi Arabia, India and China opposed the move and a subsequent huddle was “unable to reach consensus”.
Regional contribution to global GHG emissions. Panel (a) shows the share of historical cumulative net anthropogenic CO2 emissions per region from 1850 to 2019 in GtCO2. Panel (b) shows the distribution of regional per-capita GHG emissions in tonnes CO2e by region in 2019. Both (a) and (b) are separated out by emissions category. Panel (c) shows global net human-caused GHG emissions by region (in GtCO2e per year) for 1990-2019. Percentage values refer to the contribution of each region to total GHG emissions in each respective time period. (The single-year peak of emissions in 1997 was due to a forest and peat fire event in south-east Asia.) Source: IPCC (2023) Figure 2.2
4. How much hotter will the world get this century?
The world will continue to get hotter “in the near term (2021-40)”, the report says, “in nearly all considered scenarios and pathways” for greenhouse gas emissions.
Crucially, however, there is a choice over how hot it gets by the end of the century. As the synthesis report explains: “Future warming will be driven by future emissions.”
The amount of warming this century largely depends on the amount of greenhouse gases that humans release into the atmosphere in the future “with cumulative net CO2 dominating”.
In order to stop global warming, the report says, CO2 emissions are, therefore, “require[d]” to reach net-zero. (See: What is needed to stop climate change?)
The report looks at a range of plausible futures, known as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), spanning very low to very high emissions. (See: What is this report?)
If emissions are very low (SSP1-1.9), then warming is expected to temporarily “overshoot” 1.5C by “no more than 0.1C” before returning to 1.4C in 2100, the report says.
If emissions are very high (SSP5-8.5), warming could reach 4.4C in 2100. (See below for more on what it would take for the world to follow these different emissions pathways.)
Notably, there is less uncertainty in these projections than there was in AR5. This is because the IPCC has narrowed the range of “climate sensitivity”, using observations of recorded warming to date and improved understanding of clouds.
The alternative emissions futures are shown in the figure below, which illustrates the 1.1C of warming to date and potential increases to 2100 in the style of the famous “climate stripes”.
The figure also illustrates the warming that would take place during the lifetimes of three representative generations born in 1950, 1980 and 2020.
Observed (1900-2020) and projected (2021-2100) warming relative to pre-industrial temperatures (1850-1900). Projections relate to very low emissions (SSP1-1.9), low emissions (SSP1-2.6), intermediate emissions (SSP2-4.5), high emissions (SSP3-7.0) and very high emissions (SSP5-8.5). Temperatures are colour-coded from the pre-industrial average (blue-grey) through to current warming of 1.1C (orange) and potentially more than 4C by 2100 (purple). Source: IPCC (2023) Figure SPM.1
While limiting warming in line with global targets would require “deep and rapid, and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade”, these efforts would not be felt for some time. The SPM explains with high confidence:
“Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing warming…Deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would lead to a discernible slowdown in global warming within around two decades.”
This delay means that global temperatures are more likely than not to reach 1.5C during 2021-40, the report says, even if emissions are very low.
The report does not give specific “exceedance” years that breach 1.5C for each emissions pathway. (The 1.5C limit of the Paris Agreement relates to long-term averages, rather than warming in a single year.)
The SPM explains that for very low, low, intermediate and high emissions, “the midpoint of the first 20-year running average period during which [warming] reaches 1.5C lies in the first half of the 2030s”. If emissions are very high, it would be in “the late 2020s”.
Similarly, the report says warming will exceed 2C this century “unless deep reductions in CO2 and other GHG emissions occur in the coming decades”.
At the other end of the spectrum, it has “become less likely” that the world will match the very high emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5), where warming exceeds 4C this century.
The report says, with medium confidence, that emissions could only reach such high levels if there is “a reversal of current technology and/or mitigation policy trends”.
However, it says 4C of warming is possible with lower emissions, if carbon cycle feedbacks or climate sensitivity are larger than thought. It explains in a footnote to the SPM:
“Very high emissions scenarios have become less likely, but cannot be ruled out. Warming levels >4C may result from very high emissions scenarios, but can also occur from lower emission scenarios if climate sensitivity or carbon cycle feedbacks are higher than the best estimate.”
In addition to the path of greenhouse gas emissions, changing emissions of “short-lived climate forcers” (SLCFs) can also add to near- and long-term warming, the report says with high confidence. SLCFs include methane, aerosols and ozone precursors, it explains.
There have been concerns that efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions could also reduce output of cooling aerosols, “unmasking” additional warming. The report plays down this risk:
“Simultaneous stringent climate change mitigation and air pollution control policies limit this additional warming and lead to strong benefits for air quality (high confidence).”
5. What are the potential impacts at different warming levels?
With every extra bit of global warming, extremes facing the world will become larger, the report says.
The Water Cycle. Credit: USGS
For example, it says with high confidence that continued climate change will further intensify the global water cycle, driving changes to monsoons and to very wet and very dry weather.
As temperatures rise, natural land and ocean carbon sinks will be less able to absorb emissions – worsening warming further, the report says with high confidence.
Other changes to expect include further reductions in “almost all” the world’s ice systems, from glaciers to sea ice (high confidence), further global sea level rise (virtually certain), and increasing acidity and decreasing oxygen availability in the oceans (virtually certain).
Every world region will experience more climate impacts with every bit of further warming, the report says.
Compound heatwave and drought extremes are expected to become more frequent in many regions, the report says with high confidence.
Nuisance flooding.
Extreme sea level events that currently occur once in every 100 years are expected to take place at least annually in more than half all measurable locations by 2100, under any future emissions scenario, it says with high confidence. (Extreme sea level events include storm surges and flooding.)
Other projected changes include the intensification of tropical storms (medium confidence) and increases in fire weather (high confidence), according to the report.
It says that the natural variability of the Earth’s climate will continue to act alongside climate change, sometimes worsening and sometimes masking its effects.
The graphic below, from the report’s SPM, illustrates some of the regional impacts of climate change at 1.5C, 2C, 3C and 4C of global warming. (Current policies from governments have the world on track for around 2.7C of warming.)
A selection of regional climate impacts at 1.5C, 2C, 3C and 4C of global warming. [The world is currently on track for 2.7C]. Source: IPCC (2023) Figure SPM.2
In the near term, every world region is expected to face further increases in climate hazards – with rising risk for humans and ecosystems (very high confidence), the report says.
Risks expected to increase in the near-term include heat-related deaths (high confidence), food-, water- and vector-borne diseases (high confidence), poor mental health (very high confidence), flooding in coastal and low-lying cities (high confidence) and a decrease in food production in some regions (high confidence).
At 1.5C, risks will increase for “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth”, the report says. At this level of global warming, many low-elevation and small glaciers around the world would lose most of their mass or disappear, the report says with high confidence. Coral reefs are expected to decline by a further 70–90%, it adds with high confidence.
At 2C, risks associated with extreme weather events will transition to “very high”, the report says with medium confidence. At this level of warming, changes in food availability and diet quality could increase nutrition-related diseases and undernourishment for up to “hundreds of millions of people”, particularly among low-income households in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia and central America, the report says with high confidence.
At 3C, “risks in many sectors and regions reach high or very high levels, implying widespread systemic impacts”, the report says. The number of endemic species in biodiversity hotspots at a very high risk of extinction is expected to be 10 times higher than at 1.5C, it says with medium confidence.
At 4C and above, around half of tropical marine species could face local extinction, the report says with medium confidence. Around four billion people could face water scarcity, it says with medium confidence. It adds that the global area burned by wildfires could increase by 50-70% (medium confidence).
The graphic below, from the report’s SPM, illustrates the risks facing Earth’s species (a) and human health risk from extreme heat-humidity (b) under different levels of global warming.
It shows that, at temperatures above 2C, some regions will see all of their wildlife exposed to dangerous temperatures, assuming the species do not relocate to somewhere else.
It also shows that, above 2C, some people will live in regions where temperature and humidity conditions are deadly every day of the year.
Risks to species and humans at various levels of global warming. Source: IPCC (2023) SPM.3a and b
The risks identified in this report are larger at lower levels at warming, when compared to the IPCC’s last assessment in 2014.
This is because of new evidence from climate extremes already recorded, improved scientific understanding, new knowledge on how some humans and species are more vulnerable than others and a better grasp of the limits to adaptation, the report says with high confidence.
Because of “unavoidable” sea level rise, risks for coastal ecosystems, people and infrastructure will continue to increase beyond 2100, it adds with high confidence.
As climate change worsens, risks “will become increasingly complex and more difficult to manage”, the report says.
Climate change is likely to compound other societal issues, it says. For example, food shortages driven by warming are projected to interact with other factors, such as conflicts, pandemics and competition over land, the report says with high confidence.
Most pathways for how the world can meet its ambitious 1.5C temperature involve a period of “overshoot” where temperatures exceed this level of warming temporarily before dropping back down.
During this period of overshoot, the world would see “adverse impacts” that may worsen climate change, such as increased wildfires, mass mortality of ecosystems and permafrost thawing, the report says with medium confidence.
The report adds that solar geoengineering – methods for reflecting away sunlight to reduce temperature rise – has the “potential to offset warming within one or two decades and ameliorate some climate hazards”, but could also “introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems” and “would not restore climate to a previous state”.
6. What are the risks of abrupt and irreversible change?
The report warns that continued emissions of GHGs will “further affect all major climate system components and many changes will be irreversible on centennial to millennial timescales”.
While “many changes in the climate system” will become larger “in direct relation to increasing global warming”, the likelihood of “abrupt and/or irreversible outcomes increases with higher global warming levels”, the report says with high confidence. For example, it says:
“As warming levels increase, so do the risks of species extinction or irreversible loss of biodiversity in ecosystems such as forests (medium confidence), coral reefs (very high confidence) and in Arctic regions (high confidence).”
The impacts of warming on some ecosystems are already “approaching irreversibility”, the report says, “such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers, or the changes in some mountain (medium confidence) and Arctic ecosystems driven by permafrost thaw (high confidence)”.
Abrupt and irreversible changes can include those “triggered when tipping points are reached”, the report says:
“Risks associated with large-scale singular events or tipping points, such as ice sheet instability or ecosystem loss from tropical forests, transition to high risk between 1.5C-2.5C (medium confidence) and to very high risk between 2.5C-4C (low confidence).”
(See Carbon Brief’s explainer for more on tipping points.)
The report has high confidence that “the probability of low-likelihood outcomes associated with potentially very large impacts increases with higher global warming levels”. The impact of these abrupt changes would be dramatic.
Citing an example of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a major system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean that brings warm water up to Europe from the tropics and beyond, the report says:
“[AMOC] is very likely to weaken over the 21st century for all considered scenarios (high confidence), however an abrupt collapse is not expected before 2100 (medium confidence). If such a low probability event were to occur, it would very likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns and water cycle, such as a southward shift in the tropical rain belt, and large impacts on ecosystems and human activities.”
For comparison, the AR5 synthesis report also concluded that a weakening of AMOC was very likely, but said that an abrupt transition or collapse in the 21st century was very unlikely.
The report notes that “low-likelihood, high-impact outcomes could occur at regional scales even for global warming within the very likely assessed range for a given GHG emissions scenario”.
The report has a particularly stark assessment on the projected impacts of global warming on the ocean. The authors warn, with high confidence, that sea level rise is “unavoidable for centuries to millennia due to continuing deep ocean warming and ice sheet melt”. And levels will “remain elevated for thousands of years”.
While the authors are virtually certain that sea level rise will continue through this century, “the magnitude, the rate, the timing of threshold exceedances, and the long-term commitment of sea level rise depend on emissions, with higher emissions leading to greater and faster rates of sea level rise”.
Over the next 2,000 years, global average sea level “will rise by about 2-3 metres if warming is limited to 1.5C and 2-6 m if limited to 2C”, the report says, with low confidence.
Warming beyond 2C could put the Earth’s massive ice sheets at risk, the report says:
“At sustained warming levels between 2C and 3C, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will be lost almost completely and irreversibly over multiple millennia (limited evidence).”
These projections of sea level rise across thousands of years are “consistent with reconstructed levels during past warm climate periods”, the report notes.
For example, it says with medium confidence, “global mean sea level was very likely 5-25 metres higher than today roughly 3m years ago, when global temperatures were 2.5-4C higher than 1850-1900”.
In addition to rising sea levels, the authors say it is virtually certain that ocean acidification – where seawater becomes less alkaline – will continue throughout this century. And they have high confidence that deoxygenation – the decline in oxygen levels in the ocean – will too.
The report also cautions that the amount of warming – and the impact it would have – could be more severe than projected.
For example, it says, “warming substantially above the assessed very likely range for a given scenario cannot be ruled out, and there is high confidence this would lead to regional changes greater than assessed in many aspects of the climate system”.
On sea levels, the authors add:
“Global mean sea level rise above the likely range – approaching two metres by 2100 and in excess of 15 metres by 2300 under a very high GHG emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5) (low confidence) – cannot be ruled out due to deep uncertainty in ice-sheet processes and would have severe impacts on populations in low elevation coastal zones.”
7. What does the report say on loss and damage?
For the first time ever, the term “loss and damage” is mentioned in an IPCC synthesis report. This reflects its prominence in the 1.5C special report and WG2 report during the sixth assessment cycle.
It acknowledges that there has been an “improved understanding” of what constitutes economic and non-economic losses and damages. In turn, this has served to inform climate policy as well as highlight governance, financial and institutional gaps in how it is being addressed.
The AR6 synthesis report mentions the formal recognition of “loss and damage”. Source: IPCC (2023) Full report p18
After this single mention, the report discusses “losses and damages” more broadly. These, it defines in a footnote in the SPM, are the “adverse observed impacts and/or projected risks and can be economic and/or non-economic”.
Including loss and damage in the IPCC’s assessments has been a fraught process. The use of two separate terms separates the scientific “losses and damages” from the political debate of “loss and damage” under the UNFCCC, even as impacted countries hope to connect the two.
In the plenary discussions, Grenada – supported by Senegal, Antigua and Barbuda, Timor Leste, Kenya and Tanzania – wanted vulnerable countries to be referenced and the differences between the two terms explicitly clarified, given that “the distinction is often confusing to people outside of the IPCC”. The US, meanwhile, supported putting a definition in the footnote.
On the impacts of climate change, the report recognises and reviews “strengthened” evidence of heatwaves, extreme rainfall, droughts and tropical cyclones, plus their attribution to human influence, since the last synthesis report.
In all regions, extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality and morbidity, it says with very high confidence, while climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases have increased. Climate change is also contributing to humanitarian crises “where climate hazards interact with high vulnerability”, the report states with high confidence.
Climate change has caused “substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses” in land-based, freshwater, coastal, ocean and open ecosystems, as well as in glaciers and continental ice sheets, the report’s summary says with high confidence.
The A2 headline statement from the SPM that authors “spent hours crafting” to reflect vulnerability and impacts on human and natural systems. IPCC (2023) SPM p5
The widespread “losses and damages to nature and people” are unequally distributed across systems, regions and sectors”, says the report’s summary, pointing to both economic and non-economic losses.
Sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fishery, energy, and tourism that are “climate exposed” have experienced economic damages from climate change, the report states with high confidence.
Across the world, non-economic loss and damage impacts, such as mental health challenges, were associated with trauma from extreme weather events and loss of livelihoods and culture. (According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, India requested that mental health not be included in these impacts, which Finland opposed.)
The report says with high confidence that “vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected”.
For example, fatalities from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions between 2010 to 2020, compared to regions with very low vulnerability, it states with high confidence.
In urban areas, losses and damages are “concentrated” in communities of economically and socially marginalised residents, the report notes.
The figure below shows observed impacts on human systems and ecosystems attributed to climate change at global and regional levels, along with confidence in their attribution to climate change.
Observed and widespread impacts and related losses and damages attributed to climate change. Mental health and displacement impacts are limited to only regions assessed. Confidence levels reflect attribution studies so far. Source: IPCC (2023), Figure SPM1a
The report states with very high confidence that “losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming”.
These will be higher at 1.5C and even higher at 2C, the report’s summary states. Compared to AR5, “global aggregated risk levels” will be high to very high even at lower warming levels, owing to an improved understanding of exposure, vulnerability and recent evidence, including “limits to adaptation”. Climatic and non-climatic risks will increasingly interact, leading to “compound and cascading risks” that are difficult to manage.
However, near-term climate actions that rein in global warming to “close to 1.5C” could “substantially reduce” losses and damages to humans and ecosystems. Still, even these actions “cannot eliminate them all”, the report notes.
Overall, the magnitude and rate of future losses and damages “depend strongly” on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, the report says with very high confidence.
Delaying mitigation will only increase warming, which could derail the effectiveness of adaptation options, it says with high confidence, leading to more climate risks and related losses and damages.
However, the report and its summary warn with high confidence that “adaptation does not prevent all losses and damages”. The authors point out with high confidence that some ecosystems, sectors and regions have already hit limits to how much they can adapt to climate impacts. In some cases, adaptive actions are unfeasible – that is, they have “hard limits” – for certain natural systems or are simply not an option because of socioeconomic or technological barriers – known as “soft limits” – leading to unavoidable loss and damage impacts.
“One of the new messages in this report is that it effectively busts the myth of endless adaptation,” said report author Dr Aditi Mukherji, director at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), speaking at a press conference.
8. Why is climate action currently ‘falling short’?
Current pledges for how countries will cut emissions by 2030 make it likely that global warming will exceed 1.5C this century and will make it harder to limit temperatures to 2C, according to one of the headline findings of the report.
The establishment of the Paris Agreement – the landmark climate deal reached in 2015 – has led to more target-setting and “enhanced transparency” for climate action, the report says with medium confidence.
At the same time, there has been “rising public awareness” about climate change and an “increasing diversity” of people taking action. These efforts “have overall helped accelerate political commitment and global efforts to address climate change”, the report says, adding:
“In some instances, public discourses of media and organised counter movements have impeded climate action, exacerbating helplessness and disinformation and fuelling polarisation, with negative implications for climate action (medium confidence).”
It says with high confidence that many rules and economic tools for tackling emissions have been “deployed successfully” – leading to enhanced energy efficiency, less deforestation and more low-carbon technologies in many countries. This has in some cases lowered emissions.
By 2020, laws for reducing emissions were in place in 56 countries – covering 53% of global emissions, the report says.
At least 18 countries have seen their production and consumption emissions fall for at least 10 years, it adds. But these reductions have “only partly offset” global emissions increases.
The report adds that there are several options for tackling climate change that are “technically viable”, “increasingly cost effective” and are “generally supported by the public”.
It adds that, over 2010-19, there have been large decreases in the unit costs of solar power (85%), wind (55%) and lithium ion batteries (85%). In many regions, electricity from solar and wind is now cheaper than that derived from fossil fuels, the report says.
Solar installation in the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Western Resource Advocates
(According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a group of countries including Germany, Denmark and Norway strongly argued for the report to highlight that renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many regions. Finland suggested adding that fossil fuels are the “root cause” of climate change, but this was strongly opposed by Saudi Arabia.)
At the same time, there have been “large increases in their deployment”, including a global average of 10 times for solar and 100 times for electric cars, the report says.
Falling costs and increased deployment have been boosted by public research and funding and demand-side policies such as subsidies, it says, adding:
“Maintaining emission-intensive systems may, in some regions and sectors, be more expensive than transitioning to low-emission systems (high confidence).”
(According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, India, supported by Brazil, said the sentence “favoured developed countries as it did not reference feasibility and challenges”.)
Despite this, a “substantial emissions gap” remains between what global GHG emissions are projected to be in 2030 and what they must be if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5C or 2C, the report says with high confidence. (The 2030 projections are derived from country climate pledges made prior to COP26 in 2021.)
This gap would “make it likely that warming will exceed 1.5C during the 21st century”, the report says with high confidence.
Pathways for how the world can limit global warming to 1.5C or 2C depend on deep global emissions cuts this decade, it adds with high confidence.
The report says with medium confidence that country climate plans ahead of COP26 would lead to around 2.8C of warming (range from 2.1-3.4C) by 2100.
However, it adds with high confidence that policies put in place by countries by the end of 2020 would not be sufficient to achieve these climate plans. This represents an “implementation gap”.
When just policies put in place by the end of 2020 are considered, around 3.2C of warming (range 2.2-3.5C) is projected by 2100, the report says with medium confidence.
The chart below, from the SPM, illustrates the warming expected in 2100 from policies implemented by 2020 (red), as well as what emissions cuts would need to look like to reach 1.5C (blue) or 2C (green).
Expected warming in 2100 from policies implemented by the end of 2020 (red), compared with emissions cuts needed to limit warming to 1.5C (blue) or 2C (green). Source: IPCC (2023) SPM.5
“Additional implemented policies since the cut-off date would lead to those curves drawing down a little bit, compared to where they are. But everything that has happened since the IPCC cut-off – which is outside the scope of this synthesis report – would suggest that we’re still some way off.”
(A November 2022 assessment from the independent research group Climate Action Tracker found that country climate plans for 2030 in place by that time would cause 2.4C (range 1.9-2.9C) of warming. Policies in place by that time would cause 2.7C (range 2.2-3.4C), it added.)
The report also notes that many countries have signalled intentions to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas or CO2 emissions by 2050. However, it says such pledges differ “in terms of scope and specificity, and limited policies are to date in place to deliver on them”.
In most developing countries, the rollout of low-carbon technologies is lagging behind, the report adds. This is due in part to a lack of finance and technology transfer from developed countries, it says with medium confidence.
The leveraging of climate finance for developing countries has slowed since 2018, the report says with high confidence. It adds:
“Public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for climate adaptation and mitigation (high confidence).”
9. What is needed to stop climate change?
“There is a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report says with high confidence.
The synthesis delivers a blunt message on what will be needed to stop climate change, saying “limiting human-caused warming requires net-zero CO2 emissions”.
(The Earth Negotiations Bulletin says there was debate over this opening sentence in section B5 of the SPM. It reports: “The authors said that a fundamental insight of AR6 is that, to hold warming at any level, net-zero [CO2] emissions are required at some point.)
The report goes on to say, with high confidence, that reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions would imply net-negative CO2 – and would “result in a gradual decline in surface temperatures”.
Reaching net-zero emissions requires “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade”, according to the report.
Repeating language from the underlying WG3 report, it adds that global GHG emissions must peak “between 2020 and at the latest before 2025” to keep warming below 1.5C or 2C.
In contrast with the direct wording on net-zero, the report barely mentions coal, oil and gas.
A coal train moves in front of the Black Thunder mine outside Wright in October, 2016. (Andrew Graham/WyoFile)
However, it does say net-zero would mean a “substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use”.
Staying below 1.5C or 2C depends on cumulative carbon emissions at the time of reaching net-zero CO2 and the level of greenhouse gas emissions cuts this decade, the report says.
Specifically, net-zero CO2 needs to be reached “in the early 2050s” to stay below 1.5C:
“Pathways that limit warming to 1.5C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot reach net-zero CO2 in the early 2050s, followed by net-negative CO2 emissions. Those pathways that reach net-zero GHG emissions do so around the 2070s. Pathways that limit warming to 2C (>67%) reach net-zero CO2 emissions in the early 2070s.”
(There was some confusion on this point after a speech by UN secretary-general António Guterres launching the IPCC report. Guterres called for global net-zero emissions by 2050, with developed countries going faster, but did not say if he was referring to CO2 or GHGs.)
There is a direct link between cumulative carbon emissions and warming, with the report saying that every 1,000GtCO2 raises temperatures by 0.45C. The report says with high confidence:
“From a physical science perspective, limiting human-caused global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net-zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions.”
This results in “carbon budgets” that must not be exceeded if the world is to limit warming to a given level. As of the start of 2020, the remaining budget to give a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C is 500GtCO2, rising to 1,150GtCO2 for a 67% chance of staying below 2C.
(Stronger reductions of non-CO2 emissions would mean a larger carbon budget for a given temperature limit, the report notes, and vice versa.)
Some four-fifths of the total budget for 1.5C has already been used up during 1850-2019 and the last fifth would be “almost exhaust[ed]” by 2030, if emissions remained at 2019 levels.
In order to stay within the budget for 1.5C, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030 and to 60% below by 2035, falling 84% by 2050.
Even faster reductions are required for CO2 emissions, which would fall to 48% below 2019 levels by 2030, 65% by 2035 and 99% by 2050, when they would effectively hit net-zero.
The synthesis report lists these numbers in a new table, below. While the information is not new, it had not previously been presented in an accessible format. It was added during the week-long approval process and is labelled “Table XX”.
Central (median) CO2 and GHG reductions in 2030, 2035, 2040 and 2050, relative to 2019 levels, in 97 “C1” scenarios that have a greater than 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5C with no or limited overshoot, and in 311 “C3” scenarios that have a 67% chance of limiting warming to 2C. Numbers in square brackets indicate 5th to 95th percentile ranges across the scenarios. Note that most of these scenarios are designed to cut emissions globally at “least-cost”, meaning they “do not make explicit assumptions about global equity, environmental justice or intraregional income distribution”. Source: IPCC (2023) Table XX.
At a briefing for journalists held by the UK Science Media Centre, Dr Chris Jones, synthesis report author and research fellow at the UK’s Met Office, said: “We hope, obviously, this information is useful for the stocktake process.”
(This refers to the “global stocktake” of progress to date and the efforts needed to meet international climate goals, which is taking place this year as part of the UN climate process.)
The report outlines how the world could reach net-zero CO2 emissions via a “substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use, minimal use of unabated fossil fuels, and use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the remaining fossil fuel systems”.
(The phrase “unabated fossil fuels” is defined in a footnote to the report, by comparison with “abatement”, which it says would mean “capturing 90% or more CO2 from power plants, or 50–80% of fugitive methane emissions from energy supply”.)
While the world needs to make “deep and rapid” cuts in gross emissions, the use of CO2 removal (CDR) is also “unavoidable” to reach net-zero, the report says with high confidence.
The report explains:
“[P]athways reaching net-zero CO2 and GHG emissions include transitioning from fossil fuels without carbon capture and storage (CCS) to very low- or zero-carbon energy sources, such as renewables or fossil fuels with CCS, demand-side measures and improving efficiency, reducing non-CO2 GHG emissions, and CDR.”
CDR will be needed to “counterbalance” hard-to-abate residual emissions in some sectors, for example “some emissions from agriculture, aviation, shipping and industrial processes”.
Emphasising the challenge of limiting warming, the report says the fossil fuel infrastructure that has already been built would be enough to breach the 1.5C carbon budget, if operated in line with historical patterns and in the absence of extra abatement.
This is shown in the figure below. The top panel shows historical emissions and the remaining budgets for 1.5C or 2C, as well as emissions this decade if they remain at 2019 levels and the emissions of existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure.
The lower panel shows historical warming and potential increases by 2050, in relation to the carbon budgets and the range of possible emissions over the same period.
Cumulative past, projected and “committed” CO2 emissions from existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure, GtCO2, and associated global warming. Source: IPCC (2023) Figure 3.5.
Delaying emissions cuts risks “lock-in [of] high-emissions infrastructure”, the report states, adding with high confidence that this would “raise risks of stranded assets and cost-escalation, reduce feasibility, and increase losses and damages”.
The report notes that only “a small number of the most ambitious global modelled pathways” avoid temporary overshoot of the 1.5C target. However, warming “could gradually be reduced again by achieving and sustaining net-negative global CO2 emissions”.
On the other hand, the IPCC warns of “additional risks” as a result of overshoot, defined as exceeding a warming level and returning below it later. It states with high confidence:
“Overshoot entails adverse impacts, some irreversible, and additional risks for human and natural systems, all growing with the magnitude and duration of overshoot.”
The report adds that some of these impacts could make it harder to return warming to lower levels, stating with medium confidence:
“Adverse impacts that occur during this period of overshoot and cause additional warming via feedback mechanisms, such as increased wildfires, mass mortality of trees, drying of peatlands, and permafrost thawing, weakening natural land carbon sinks and increasing releases of GHGs would make the return more challenging.”
It says the risks around overshoot, as well as the “feasibility and sustainability concerns” for CDR, can be minimised by faster action to cut emissions. Similarly, development pathways that use resources more efficiently also minimise dependence on CDR.
10. How can individual sectors scale up climate action?
In order to limit warming to 2C or below by the end of the century, all sectors must undergo “rapid and deep, and in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions”, the report says.
Limiting warming to 1.5C with “no or limited overshoot” requires achieving net-zero CO2 emissions in the early 2050s. To keep warming to 2C, net-zero CO2 must be achieved “around the early 2070s”.
It continues, with medium confidence:
Source: IPCC (2023) Full report, p68
Reducing emissions from the energy sector requires a combination of actions, the report says: a “substantial reduction” in the use of fossil fuels; increased deployment of energy sources with zero or low emissions, “such as renewables or fossil fuels with CO2 capture and storage” (CCS); improving energy efficiency and conservation; and “switching to alternative energy carriers”.
For sectors that are harder to decarbonise, such as shipping, aviation, industrial processes and some agriculture-related emissions, the report notes that using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies to counterbalance these residual emissions “is unavoidable”.
Graphic credit: The Nature Conservancy
The language around CCS and CDR was some of the most contentious during the approval session. According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Germany “suggested including a brief overview of the feasibility and current deployment of different CDR methods”, with France adding that policymakers must be made aware of the associated challenges.
But Saudi Arabia countered that if these barriers were made explicit in this section, it “would require similar balancing language on the feasibility of solar and renewables elsewhere in the report”.
Similar discussions were had around CCS, with the authors ultimately agreeing to add a sub-paragraph in a footnote that details both the limits and benefits of CCS, at the urging of Germany and Saudi Arabia, respectively.
The report discusses several technologies across a range of maturity, removal and storage potential and costs. It finds that “all assessed modelled pathways that limit warming to 2C (>67%) or lower by 2100” rely, at least in part, on mitigation from agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU). Such approaches are currently “the only widely practised CDR methods”, the report notes.
However, it details trade-offs and barriers to large-scale implementation of AFOLU-based mitigation, including climate change impacts, competing demands for land use, endangering food security and violation of Indigenous rights.
The report also discusses sector-specific actions that can be taken in order to limit emissions and climate impacts. These transformations, it says, are “required for high levels of human health and well-being, economic and social resilience, ecosystem health and planetary health”.
The chart below shows near-term feasibility of adaptation (left) and mitigation (right) options, divided across six sectors (top left to bottom right): energy supply; land, water and food; settlements and infrastructure; health; society, livelihood and economy; and industry and waste.
For adaptation options, the figure shows the potential for synergies with mitigation strategies and the feasibility of these options up to 1.5C of warming, from low (light purple) to high (dark blue). The dots in each box represent the confidence level, from low (one dot) to high (three dots).
On the right, mitigation options are presented with their potential contribution to emissions reductions by 2030, in GtCO2e per year. The colours indicate the cost of each option, from low (yellow) to high (red), with blue indicating options that are cheaper than fossil fuels. Some of the mitigation options with the highest potential for cost-saving are solar and wind power, efficient vehicles, lighting and other equipment, and public transit and cycling.
Feasibility of climate adaptation options and their synergies with mitigation actions (left) and potential contributions of mitigation options to emissions reductions by the end of the decade (right). Source: IPCC (2023) Figure 4.4a
Some of these mitigation options relate to changes in energy demand, rather than supply. This includes “changes in infrastructure use, end-use technology adoption and socio-cultural and behavioural change”, the report says, noting that such changes can reduce emissions in end-use sectors by 40-70% by mid-century.
The chart below shows the mid-century mitigation potential of demand-side changes across a range of sectors: food (including diet and waste), land transport, buildings, industry and electricity. The green arrows represent the mitigation potential in GtCO2 per year.
The mitigation potential, in GtCO2e per year, of five demand-side sectors (top to bottom): food, land transport, buildings, industry and electricity. The grey bar shows the additional emissions that continued electrification will add. Source: IPCC (2023) Figure 4.4b
Section 4.5 of the report goes into detail about near-term mitigation and adaptation, in subsections covering energy systems; industry; cities, settlements and infrastructure; land, ocean, food and water; health and nutrition; and society, livelihoods and economies. At the urging of India (supported by Saudi Arabia and China) in the approval session, the report notes that the availability and feasibility of these options differs “across systems and regions”.
On energy systems, the report says with high confidence that “major energy system transitions” are required and with very high confidence that adaptation “can help reduce climate-related risks to the energy system”, including extreme events that can damage or otherwise affect energy infrastructure.
It notes that many of the options for large-scale emissions reductions are “technically viable and supported by the public”. It adds:
“Maintaining emission-intensive systems may, in some regions and sectors, be more expensive than transitioning to low emission systems.”
However, adaptation measures for certain types of power generation, such as hydropower, have “decreasing effectiveness at higher levels of warming” beyond 1.5C or 2C, the report notes. Reducing vulnerabilities in the energy sector requires diversification and changes on the demand side, including improving energy efficiency.
The strategies to reduce industrial emissions “differ by type of industry”, the report says. Light manufacturing can be “largely decarbonised” through available technologies and electrification, while decarbonising others will require the use of carbon capture and storage and the development of new technologies. The report adds that extreme events will cause “supply and operational disruptions” across many industries.
“Effective mitigation” strategies can be implemented at every step of building design, construction and use, the report says. It notes that demand-side measures can help reduce transportation-related emissions, as can re-allocating street space for pedestrians and cyclists and enabling telework.
With high confidence, it says:
“Key infrastructure systems including sanitation, water, health, transport, communications and energy will be increasingly vulnerable if design standards do not account for changing climate conditions.”
The report also says that “green” and “blue” infrastructure have myriad benefits: climate change mitigation, reducing extreme weather risk and improving human health and livelihoods.
AFOLU, as well as the ocean, offer “substantial mitigation and adaptation potential…that could be upscaled in the near term across most regions”, the report finds. It notes that conservation and restoration of ecosystems provide “the largest share” of this potential. It reads:
Source: IPCC (2023) Full report, p73
Such actions must be taken with the cooperation and involvement of local communities and Indigenous peoples, the report adds.
With very high confidence, the report states that “mainstream[ing]” health considerations into policies will benefit human health. There is also high confidence in the existing availability of “effective adaptation options” in the health sector, such as improving access to drinking water and vaccine development. The report states with high confidence:
“A key pathway to climate resilience in the health sector is universal access to healthcare.”
The report calls for improving climate education, writing with high confidence:
“Climate literacy and information provided through climate services and community approaches, including those that are informed by Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge, can accelerate behavioural changes and planning.”
It says that many types of adaptation options “have broad applicability across sectors and provide greater risk reduction benefits when combined”. It also calls for “accelerating commitment and follow-through” from private sector actors.
11. What does the report say about adaptation?
The world is not adapting fast enough to climate change – and limits to adaptation have already been reached in some regions and ecosystems, the report says.
It says with very high confidence that there has been progress with adaptation planning and roll-out in all sectors and regions – and that accelerated adaptation will bring benefits for human wellbeing.
Adaptation to water-related risks make up more than 60% of all documented adaptation practices, the report says with high confidence.
Examples of effective adaptation have occurred in food production, such as through planting trees on cropland, diversification in agriculture and water management and storages, the report says with high confidence.
“Ecosystem-based approaches”, such as urban greening and restoring wetlands and forests, have been effective in “reducing flood risks and urban heat”, it adds with high confidence.
In addition, combinations of “non-structural measures”, such as early warning systems, and structural measures such as levees have reduced deaths from flooding, the report says with medium confidence.
But, despite progress, most adaptation is “fragmented, incremental, sector-specific and unequally-distributed across regions”, the report says, adding:
“Adaptation gaps exist across sectors and regions, and will continue to grow under current levels of implementation, with the largest adaptation gaps among lower income groups.”
Key barriers to adaptation include a lack of financial resources, political commitment and a “low sense of urgency”, the report says.
The total amount spent on adaptation has increased since 2014. However, there is currently a widening gap between the costs of adaptation and the amount of money set aside for adaptation, according to the report.
It says with very high confidence that the “overwhelming majority” of climate finance goes towards mitigation rather than adaptation. (See: Why is finance an ‘enabler’ and ‘barrier’ for climate action?)
It adds with medium confidence that financial losses caused by climate change can reduce funds available for adaptation – hence, leaving countries more vulnerable to future impacts. This is particularly true for developing and least-developed countries.
The report says with medium confidence that some people are already experiencing “soft limits” to adaptation. “Soft limits” are those where there is currently no way to adapt to the change, but there may be a way in the future. This includes small-scale farmers and households living in low-lying coastal areas.
Some areas have reached “hard limits” to adaptation, where no further adaptation to climate change is possible, the report says with high confidence. This includes some rainforests, tropical coral reefs, coastal wetlands, and polar and mountain ecosystems.
In the future, “adaptation options that are feasible and effective today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming”, the report says. It adds:
“With increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits.”
For example, the effectiveness of reducing climate risks by switching crop varieties or planting patterns – commonplace on farms today – is projected to decrease above 1.5C of warming, the report says with high confidence. The effectiveness of on-farm irrigation is projected to decline above 3C, it adds.
Above 1.5C of warming, small island populations and regions dependent on glaciers for freshwater could face hard adaptation limits, the report says with medium confidence.
At this level of warming, ecosystems such as coral reefs, rainforests and polar and mountain ecosystems will have surpassed hard adaptation limits – meaning some ecosystem-based approaches will become ineffective, the report says with high confidence.
By 2C, soft limits are projected for multiple staple crops, particularly in tropical regions, it says with high confidence. By 3C, hard limits are projected for water management in parts of Europe, it says with medium confidence.
Even before limits to adaptation are reached, adaptation cannot prevent all loss and damage from climate change, the report says with high confidence. (See: What does the report say on loss and damage?)
(According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, China requested removing a reference to “adaptation limits” from one of the headline statements of the SPM. It was opposed by countries including the UK, Denmark, Germany, Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Mexico and Belize.)
The report says with high confidence that sea level rise poses a “distinct and severe adaptation challenge”. This is because it requires dealing with both slow onset changes and increases in extreme sea level events such as storm surges and flooding.
The graphic below illustrates some of the adaptation responses to sea level rise, including the time it takes for implementation and their typical intended lifetimes.
“Ecosystem-based” approaches include enhancing coastal wetlands. Such approaches come with co-benefits for biodiversity and reducing emissions, but start to become ineffective above 1.5C of warming, the report says with medium confidence.
“Sediment-based” approaches include seawalls. These can be ineffective “as they effectively reduce impacts in the short-term but can also result in lock-ins and increase exposure to climate risks in the long-term”, the report says.
Planned relocation methods can be more effective if they are aligned with sociocultural values and involve local communities, the report says.
The report warns with high confidence that there is now more evidence of “maladaptation” – actions intended to adapt to climate change that create more risk and vulnerability.
Examples of maladaptation include new urban buildings that cannot easily be adjusted for climate risks or high-cost irrigation systems for agriculture in areas where droughts are projected to intensify, the report says.
Maladaptation “especially affects” marginalised and vulnerable groups, including Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, low-income households and people living in informal settlements. This can “reinforce and entrench” existing inequalities.
12. What are the benefits of near-term climate action?
The report is clear that fast action to mitigate emissions and adapt to climate impacts has a range of benefits – but acknowledges that it will likely be disruptive and have high up-front costs.
The rate of climate change and the associated risks “depend strongly” on near-term climate action, the report says. The SPM notes with high confidence:
“The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
The overarching benefit of near-term mitigation action is less global warming over time and thereby fewer negative impacts, such as extreme weather events.
Accelerated mitigation measures would also reduce future adaptation costs alongside other benefits, such as reducing the risk of irreversible climate changes, the synthesis report says.
A quick reduction in methane emissions, in particular, can limit near-term warming, the report says with high confidence. Methane has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2.
Delaying actions to prevent further warming will lead to a larger temperature rise, which will, in turn, make adaptation measures less effective, it says.
Adaptation actions can take a long time to be put in place. The report stresses that long-term planning and faster implementation, especially in this decade, “is important to close adaptation gaps”.
Adaptation measures, the report adds, can improve agricultural productivity, innovation, health and wellbeing, food security, livelihood and biodiversity conservation.
Text on mitigation co-benefits for sustainable development Source: IPCC (2023) Full report, p59
There are other co-benefits to cutting emissions and taking faster action on adaptation. The SPM says that “deep, rapid and sustained” action in this decade would lower air pollution, spark more walking and cycling and prompt more sustainable, healthy diets.
The money saved from a health perspective as a result of improved air quality “can be of the same order of magnitude as mitigation costs, and potentially even larger”, the report adds.
There are further economic benefits to near-term climate action, but the SPM says the cost-benefit analysis “remains limited” in assessing all avoided damages.
Outside of the benefits of avoiding possible damages, the economic and social benefits of limiting global warming to 2C exceeds mitigation costs in most literature, the SPM says with medium confidence.
The SPM says that faster mitigation with emissions peaking earlier increases the co-benefits of action and reduces risks and costs in the long-term.
It further says, with high confidence, that near-term actions require “high up-front investments and potentially disruptive changes”.
Barriers to deploy mitigation and adaptation actions need to be removed or reduced to utilise these options at scale, the report says.
To scale up these actions, the report says that both low- and high-cost options, such as using more renewables, making buildings more efficient and using electric vehicles, are required to avoid future lock-ins, advance innovation and start transformational changes.
Leaf charging at the Lionshead parking facility in Vail September 30, 2021.
The impacts of these changes can be “moderated” by reforms and policies in order to accelerate climate action such as improving access to finance for low-emissions infrastructure and technologies, especially in developing countries.
Delaying action comes with multiple challenges, the report says, such as cost escalation risks, lock-in of infrastructure and stranded assets.
In other words, continuing to install unabated fossil fuel infrastructure will “lock-in” emissions into the future. And taking action on fossil-fuel burning sooner rather than later would limit the size of stranded assets – such as fossil-fuel infrastructure – that will be worth a lot less money in future in a world more reliant on low-carbon energy.
Delaying action on this would increase policy risks and may endanger efforts to limit global warming, the report says with high confidence.
Climate action is enabled by good climate governance providing an overall direction, the report says.
This involves setting targets, including climate action in different policy areas, prioritising equitable decision-making and enhancing access to finance. The report adds that climate action benefits from drawing on a diverse range of knowledge.
13. Why is finance an ‘enabler’ and ‘barrier’ for climate action?
Finance is one of the “critical enablers” to speed up climate action, the synthesis report outlines, and lack of funding is a barrier to progress.
Difficulty accessing climate finance slows down both mitigation and adaptation action, particularly in developing countries, the report warns. Improving access to funds will help to accelerate climate action, the report says with very high confidence.
It adds that funding for mitigation and adaptation needs to increase “many-fold” to achieve climate goals, address risks and speed up investment in emissions reductions.
Global climate finance flows have increased and financing channels have broadened over the past decade, but the report notes that average growth has slowed since 2018. The report adds with high confidence:
“Public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for climate adaptation and mitigation.”
It assesses that climate funding is “uneven” and has “developed heterogeneously across regions and sectors”, adding that the money falls short of what is needed to slash emissions and adapt to climate impacts.
There is enough global capital to close investment gaps, the report says, but “barriers” are preventing this funding being used instead for climate action.
Closing gaps and improving access to finance, alongside other actions, can “act as a catalyst for accelerating” climate action, the SPM says. The report builds on this, saying:
“Accelerated support from developed countries and multilateral institutions is a critical enabler to enhance mitigation and adaptation action and can address inequities in finance, including its costs, terms and conditions, and economic vulnerability to climate change.”
Many developing countries do not have enough financial resources for adaptation to help reduce associated economic and non-economic losses and damages, the report says.
The SPM outlines with high confidence that increasing access to finance can help tackle “soft”, avoidable adaptation limits and avert some of the rising risks of climate change. (See: What does the report say about adaptation?)
The “overwhelming majority” of climate finance is geared towards mitigation. But this still falls short, the SPM says, adding with medium confidence:
“Average annual modelled mitigation investment requirements for 2020 to 2030 in scenarios that limit warming to 2C or 1.5C are a factor of three to six greater than current levels, and total mitigation investments (public, private, domestic and international) would need to increase across all sectors and regions.”
Limited access to funding is listed as one of the key barriers to a number of actions including the adoption of low-emissions technology in developing countries.
Harmful impacts of climate change can further reduce a nation’s climate financial resources by causing losses and damages and also impeding economic growth. This adds to the financial constraints for adaptation, especially in developing and least developed countries.
The largest climate finance gaps and opportunities exist in developing countries, the report says, adding that more support is needed from developed nations and multilateral institutions to address inequities.
This could come in the form of larger public grants for climate funding “for vulnerable regions, e.g., in sub-Saharan Africa,” the report says. It adds that these would be cost-effective and have high social returns in terms of access to basic energy.
Reducing the barriers standing in the way of committing more money to climate action would require “clear signalling and support by governments” through actions such as decreasing the perceived risks of climate investments and increasing the returns, the SPM says.
Central banks, investors and other financial actors can change the “systemic underpricing of climate-related risks” and also reduce the “widening disparities” between the money available and the amount required, the SPM adds, noting:
“Public finance is an important enabler of adaptation and mitigation, and can also leverage private finance.”
Developed countries pledged to provide $100bn in climate funding each year by 2020 to help developing countries deal with climate change. The SPM notes that, as of 2018, finance levels were below this goal. (In 2021, Carbon Brief analysed why climate finance flows are falling short.)
According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, India, supported by Saudi Arabia and Brazil, requested a reference to this goal in a section on the adoption of low-emission technologies to highlight the finance gap for developing countries.
Tejal Kanitkar, India. Credit: IISD
The final report does reference the missed pledge elsewhere, but the text of low-emission technologies instead refers more broadly to the constraints of “limited finance”.
The SPM says that climate-resilient development – prioritising climate in all aspects of decision-making and policies – is aided by more international cooperation to improve access to finance and better align climate finance flows with the money required.
The report says faster global financial cooperation is key to aiding low-emission and just transitions. (A just transition is one in which workers and their communities are supported in the shift to a low-carbon economy, which is central to the idea of climate justice.) It can also address inequities in access to finance.
In order to scale-up financial flows, the report says there must be lower regulatory market barriers, a stronger alignment of public finance and more public funding in an effort to reduce the perceived risks of low-emission investments.
14. What are the co-benefits for the Sustainable Development Goals?
Comprising 17 goals, this “shared blueprint” for people and the planet recognises that ending poverty “and other deprivations” must accompany strategies that improve health, education, reduce inequality while combating climate change and protecting oceans and forests.
The synthesis report lays out how climate adaptation and mitigation actions can translate into co-benefits that aid countries’ efforts to meet their SDGs.
According to the report, both sets of actions have more potential synergies than potential trade-offs with the SDGs. This, however, depends on the scale and context of how mitigation and adaptation measures are implemented, the interactions between and within different sectors involved, cooperation between countries, governance, policy design and how these options are timed, sequenced and stringently deployed.
Ending “extreme poverty, energy poverty and providing decent living standards to all, consistent with sustainable development objectives…can be achieved without significant global emissions growth”, the report states with high confidence.
The report’s summary recognises that countries are at different levels of development, seeking to improve the well-being of people. With high confidence, it states:
“Development priorities among countries also reflect different starting points and contexts, and enabling conditions for shifting development pathways towards increased sustainability will therefore differ, giving rise to different needs.”
Nonetheless, many mitigation and adaptation systems can help countries meet their near-term development goals in energy, urban and land systems, the report says with high confidence.
Comanche Generating Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
For instance, better air quality and improved health are some of the many co-benefits of deploying low-carbon energy systems, while urban mass transit powered by these systems can contribute to health, employment, energy security and “deliver equity”.
Conserving, protecting and restoring ecosystems, while managing them to help communities adapt to climate impacts, can help regions attain their food security and biodiversity conservation goals, the report says with high confidence.
In countries and regions that are highly dependent on fossil fuels – not just for energy, but revenues and jobs – mitigating risk calls for “just transition principles, processes and practices” and policies that promote economic and energy diversification, the SPM says with high confidence.
Mitigation actions that are embedded within a wider development context can, therefore, make for faster, deeper and wider emissions reductions, it states with medium confidence.
But to design “context-relevant” actions and plan for their implementation “requires considering people’s needs, biodiversity, and other sustainable development dimensions”, the report states with very high confidence.
Importantly, the report calls “effective governance” to limit potential trade-offs of some mitigation choices – such as the risks posed by large-scale afforestation and bioenergy projects to food systems, biodiversity, ecosystems and livelihoods, it says with high confidence.
Crucially, this requires “adequate institutional capacity at all levels” to safeguard against trade-offs.
Mitigation and adaptation actions taken together – accounting for trade-offs – can benefit not just human well-being, but deliver better ecosystem and planetary health, the report states with high confidence. Social safety nets and land restoration are examples that serve both adaptation and mitigation goals, with co-benefits for poverty reduction and food security.
However, there will be trade-offs, the report cautions. But these can be “evaluated and minimised” by giving weight to “capacity building, finance, technology transfer, governance, development, gender and social equity considerations with meaningful participation of local communities, Indigenous peoples and vulnerable populations”, it states with high confidence.
15. What does the report say about equity and inclusion?
“Equity remains a central element in the UN climate regime,” the SPM says. The report has a section dedicated to “equity and inclusion in climate change action”, which discusses how to ensure that those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change can contribute to and benefit from climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
The SPM says that “ambitious mitigation pathways imply large and sometimes disruptive changes in economic structure”. This can include a “shifting of income and employment” during the transition to low-emissions activities.
But the report has high confidence that “social safety nets” and “redistributive policies” that “shield the poor and vulnerable” can resolve trade-offs for a range of sustainable development goals, such as education, hunger, poverty, gender and energy access.
For example, it has high confidence that “while some jobs may be lost, low-emissions development can also open up opportunities to enhance skills and create jobs”. The report emphasises the importance of “broadening equitable access” to the relevant finance, technologies and governance.
It adds:
“Equity, inclusion, just transitions, broad and meaningful participation of all relevant actors in decision making at all scales enable deeper societal ambitions for accelerated mitigation, and climate action more broadly, and build social trust, support transformative changes and an equitable sharing of benefits and burdens”.
The report says that between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people are living in “contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change”, where vulnerability is highest in “locations with poverty, governance challenges and limited access to basic services and resources, violent conflict and high levels of climate-sensitive livelihoods”.
It says that adaptation can be used to moderate the risks of climate change and the authors have high confidence that “adaptation progress is unevenly distributed with observed adaptation gaps”. The report adds:
“Present development challenges causing high vulnerability are influenced by historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, especially for many Indigenous Peoples and local communities.”
To effectively address adaptation gaps and avoid maladaptation, the report says that “meaningful participation and inclusive planning, informed by cultural values, Indigenous knowledge, local knowledge, and scientific knowledge can help”.
The report also notes that different countries have their own priorities for development, which give rise to differing needs.
For example, it says that “in several countries just transition commissions, task forces and national policies have been established”, while in others, the principles of a just transition need to be integrated into policies through “collective and participatory decision-making processes”.
This section of the report also discusses behavioural interventions. It has high confidence that “individuals with high socioeconomic status contribute disproportionately to emissions, and have the highest potential for emissions reductions”. It says there are many options for reducing emissions from this group, which can be supported by policies, infrastructure, and technology.
Meanwhile, it has high confidence that, for lower-income groups, “eradicating extreme poverty, energy poverty, and providing decent living standards to all in these regions in the context of achieving sustainable development objectives, in the near-term, can be achieved without significant global emissions growth”.
Colorado Capitol Dome from the south. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
On the first Friday in January, three days before she was sworn in as a new state representative from Denver’s south metro area, Ruby Dickson was part of a tour of relatively new businesses in the Boulder area.
This was not your typical chamber of commerce tour, though. It had been organized by then State Rep. Tracey Bernett, who had taken an extraordinary interest in climate change legislation during her first two years in the General Assembly.
The four businesses had in common the goal of drawing carbon dioxide from the air, in the case of one business through the technique of biochar, or creating new processes that eliminated need for emissions such as exist now with virgin steel-making.
If ebullient during the tour, Bernett was under a storm cloud, accused by the district attorney in Boulder County of falsely claiming residency in Louisville, a part of her old district but apart from her home near Longmont that had been put into a new district. Two days later, she resigned.
In leaving, she handed off an idea for legislation to the incoming representative Dickson.
That bill, HB23-1210, “Carbon Management,” easily passed its first legislative test on March 9, getting approval from the House Energy and Environment Committee in an 8-3 vote.
Biochar projects such as this one near Berthoud would be eligible for state funding under the proposed legislation. Photo/Allen Best
If it becomes law, the legislation will crack the door open in Colorado for new technologies and practices that many climate change activists insist will be necessary for the state to meet its mid-century decarbonization goals. But many activists who worry just as intensely about the risks of climate change are convinced it’s a misstep.
The bill has two components. One would make “carbon management projects” eligible for grants under the state Clean Air Program that was established by legislators in 2022 with funding of $25 million. Potential applications among the 11 defined in the bill include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, durable geological carbon sequestration, and direct air capture and storage.
Enhanced oil recovery—a practice that has provoked hurricane-strength opposition in other places—is expressly excluded from potential grant application.
The program requires cash matches to the grants before the program expires in 2028. The first round of grants will become available in spring 2023.
The second major component of the bill directs the Colorado Energy Office to work with a contractor to create a carbon management roadmap in consultation with stakeholders. It is to be delivered to legislators by February 2025.
This proposed roadmap would be an extension of and complementary to the legislative recommendations issued in late February by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. That 67-page document, “Creating Colorado’s Carbon Sequestration Framework,” goes into great detail regarding the questions that Colorado must resolve if it is to find ways to sequester carbon emission from hard-to-decarbonize sectors in decades ahead.
That new report was triggered specifically by Colorado’s landmark legislation in 2019 that adopted sweeping economy-wise carbon reduction goals for 2025, 2030, and 2050.
An economist, Dickson has a master’s degree from Oxford and, according to her LinkedIn profile, seems to speak Chinese. The thesis for her undergraduate degree was an analysis of Chinese citizens’ investment habits.
She’s a researcher for Rethink Priorities, a consultancy that tries to help organizations identify what resources would be most effective in addressing animal welfare, climate change, and other causes.
Ruby Dickson.
“A lot of the things I’ve worked on involve climate change,” she said in an interview with Big Pivots several days prior to the committee hearing. “I have worked on carbon management technology from that perspective. That is why I was so eager to work on this when I went into the Legislature this year.”
Told that Sen. Chris Hansen had been engaged in something similar, she went to him to solicit interest in a co-sponsorship.
“It was a pretty easy conversation,” she reported.
Dickson in the interview stressed the stopping of further emissions and then actually removing emissions from the air. “There are a lot of potential solutions here, and we shouldn’t leave any stone unturned,” she said.
When this reporter suggested she expect an 8-3 vote along party lines, the three Republicans on the committee all in opposition, she said she reserved hope. One of her bills, regarding work force transition, had gained unanimous Republican support in its committee hearing, she noted.
In this case, though, she was wrong—although Rep. Ty Winter, a rancher from the natural-gas rich Las Animas County whose district extends from Trinidad to the Kansas border, did tell her that he appreciated her efforts to consider the needs of his rural constituents.
“Respectfully no, but I appreciate you thinking about this stuff,” he said in explaining his vote.
Dickson had said that many of the people who would most benefit from and take advantage of the new technologies would be rural people “and people whose jobs are being affected by the transition away from fossil fuels.”
In her opening pitch to the committee, Dickson emphasized both the emergency and the opportunity.
“We really need to set our sights on a net-zero goal very soon,” she said. Colorado, she went on, has an abundance of resources to achieve this, both solar and wind, but potential geologic reservoirs, underground geological formations where carbon emissions can be stowed with some confidence that they will not find their way to the surface. The Canon City Embayment is the most prominent such geological formation in Colorado, but there are others.
Dickson also talked about Colorado’s highly-educated demographics but also the workers being disrupted by the new energy economy. This bill, she said, recognizes the need for guardrails to consider environmental justice. She talked about extensive conversations with environmental and labor groups, and the potential to create well-paying jobs.
This will not pose a cost to Colorado. “I also think there is something to be said for doing our part for the climate crisis and because it’s the right thing to do.”
Where this will go, she acknowledged, is unclear.
“We don’t know what it will look like over the next couple of decades. It could end up being a serious positive for our economy here. We have so many advantages.”
And her takeaways:
“This is the first step in making Colorado the national and even global leader in carbon management,” she said.
“We need to push down the cost curve by learning by doing,” she said, anticipating one counterargument.
The Carbon Management bill specifically excludes enhanced oil recovery from eligibility for grants under Colorado’s Clean Air Program. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Dickson’s bill did get pushback, primarily from the hardest-core environmental activists who, in an unusual way, found common ground with the Legislature’s most ardent climate change denier.
Rep. Ken DeGraaf, who is from Colorado Springs, used the occasion to again suggest that carbon dioxide is not a problem to human health until it gets to be something like 12,000 parts per million. And, he suggested when quizzing witnesses, wasn’t this an extravagant cost for Colorado to attempt to trim emissions when it would make very little difference anyway on a global scale?
Morey Wolfson, who has been in Colorado’s environmental trenches for about 50 years, had testified that carbon removal is extravagantly expensive.
“Here’s the math,” he said. To reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, now at 420 parts per million, by just one part, will require removal of 8 billion tons at a cost of $100 per ton. That, he said, will cost $800 billion. “Your state budget is $42 billion.”
“There are so many inexpensive ways to not put carbon into the atmosphere in the first place,” he said.
Jan Rose, from the Colorado Coalition for a Livable Climate, warned that the bill lacked the guardrails needed when moving carbon dioxide around in a gaseous form. She also suggested room for missteps. “I see red flashing signs that say Solyndra,” she said,
referring to California solar company that filed for bankruptcy in 2011, defaulting on $535 million in federal loans.
Leslie Glustrom, testifying on behalf of Clean Energy Action, urged amendments to recognize risks. “If your pipeline breaks, your local concentrations are high enough to kill you,” she warned.
“Prioritize public health and safety first” before enabling companies to chase the Q4 tax credits delivered by the Inflation Reduction Act, she said. The IRA provides tax credits designed to encourage innovation of carbon-removal technologies.
Glustrom also warned against “group think behavior”—a statement again seized upon by DeGraaf, who reporting seeing a “large degree of group think” in play.
Wolfson, too, warned of the “bandwagon effect.”
“Those who support carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and sequestration, 99% have not done the math that I am talking about,” he said. “I have read thousands of articles, and only 1% of the articles ever tell you that removing 1 ppm will cost you $800 billion.”
Several other witnesses pushed back. Christopher Neidl, who describes himself as a carbon removal evangelist from Austin, Texas, downplayed the the threat from leaks from pipelines.
“They’re not exactly an enormous health threat,” he said. He urged approval of the bill so that “Colorado is in the front of the line instead of being a taker of the technology when it comes.”
Individuals from a new organization called the Signal Tech Coalition also testified. “We are not going to meet our climate goals without carbon removal technologies,” said Quinn Antus, the co-founder and executive director.
The Polis administration has also endorsed the bill’s contents. Keith Hay, the senior director of policy at the Colorado Energy Office, called it an “important first step” to reduction of emissions from economic sectors of Colorado’s economy that will be particularly difficult to decarbonize.
“It sends a signal to the marketplace that Colorado is serious about creating a marketplace for the technologies and that jobs that come with it,” he said. He also noted a “number of Fortune 500 companies that are looking to move into a state with carbon capture technologies.”
Representatives from the Blue-Green Alliance; Healthy Air Water Colorado; Boulder County; Colorado Communities for Climate Action; and Xcel Energy also testified in support. The Xcel rep said that this was among the technologies that it is monitoring and evaluating.
Dickson wrapped up her case by citing a study by Lazard, the consultancy, that found solar prices had dropped 99.5% between 1975 and 2019. ($115/watt to 27 cents/watt). On-shore wind dropped 70% from 2009 to 2021.
The cost of this large-scale drawdown, she said can’t be known now. “But I would guess—and I think a lot of the data show—that the more we try, the cheaper it is going to be.”
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As the votes were taken, there was one interesting additional interplay.
McGraaf dismissed the value of such work. He also said he was “just not a fan of government interference in the market, as was brought up with the Solyndra example that was cited. I am not a fan of government picking winners or losers.”
Rep. Mike Weissman had a lengthy response. He addressed the roadmap and the “very broad spectrum of potential technologies,” and suggested there will be “downstream policy choices and investment choices that we could make.”
Then he addressed the idea of markets free of policy choices. “Frankly, we never have had a free market for energy policy in this country in a couple of key perspectives. We have never adequately internalized the cost of pollution with anything we do, and that’s why we are here today. We have also made policy choices, from the very earliest phase of our country in terms of subsidizing different things.”
Weissman then went on to describe various policies from the opening of federal lands for coal extraction beginning in 1840 to the Energy Act of 2005 that all, in some way, subsidized fossil fuel extraction and use.
“And on and on and on and on,” he continued.
“The question is not whether policy has something to say what about how the market works and energy, but what we say.”
Xcel truck at Shoshone plant. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
Holy Cross Energy aims to distribute 100% emission-free electricity to its 55,000 members in the Aspen, Rifle, and Vail areas by 2030. How will it do that?
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Colorado’s second largest utility, has a different but related problem. It wants to best use infrastructure associated with its coal-burning operations at Craig after the last unit closes before 2030.
One clue may lie in Pueblo. There a pilot program testing a new technology for long-duration energy storage will be deployed by Xcel Energy and Form Energy by the end of 2025. The new iron-air batteries will be able to use chemical processes to store electricity and then discharge it for up to 100 hours.
The new battery technology has been reported to be 10 times less expensive than lithium-ion batteries. Iron is abundant in the United States, and the batteries are non-flammable.
In announcing the pilot projects, Bob Frenzel, the chief executive of Xcel, said the 100-hour batteries at Pueblo and at a coal site in Minnesota “will strengthen the grid against normal day-to-day, week-to-week, and season-to-season weather variability, in addition to extreme weather events, including severe winter storms and polar vortex events.”
Duration of storage matters entirely as electric utilities add low-cost and emissions-free renewables. Short-duration storage, such as the lithium-ion batteries installed in conjunction with a new solar farm near Glenwood Springs in 2022, can help. They provide two to four hours of storage.
With 100 hours of storage, utilities can smooth the highs and the lows of renewables. Consider Uri, the week of cold in 2022 when wind on Colorado’s eastern plains ceased for several days. Utilities cranked up turbines burning natural gas that was suddenly in high demand. Consumers are still paying off those bills. Tri-State even resorted to burning oil.
Summers have brought inverse problems of spiking demand caused by heat. In 2021, it got so hot in Portland that electric lines for trains melted, and some people without air conditioning literally baked to death in apartments. Colorado regulators worry whether the state’s utilities can handle such weather extremes.
Iron-air batteries alone are unlikely to solve the intermittencies of renewable energy or the havoc produced by a warming and more erratic climate. This pilot project does represent a notable effort to explore whether they can be scaled.
“This is an exciting new frontier for energy storage in Colorado,” said Mike Kruger, chief executive of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, a trade group of 275 members. “This announcement goes to show that when there is clear policy, American companies can innovate to meet the electric power sector’s needs.”
Holy Cross Energy has been diversifying its supplies, both locally and regionally, but still depends largely upon wholesale deliveries from Xcel. The Glenwood Springs-based cooperative in 2022 delivered 50% emissions free electricity but has a goal of 100% just seven years from now.
Sam Whelan, the vice president for finance at Holy Cross, said that increased reliability by Xcel will help Holy Cross reliably deliver electricity to its members.
Holy Cross has been investigating its own options—and has had conversations with Form Energy. It will look at many alternatives, including green hydrogen and pumped-storage hydro, each with problems but also promise.
“You have to start something, and you have to start in small increments as well,” says Whelan.
The solar industry, he also started small. “It was not that long ago that solar costs were significantly higher,” he observed. Now, solar has become competitive. “It will take these incremental storage projects to prove out and hopefully pave the way.”
Tri-State, at a recent meeting with stakeholders, also reported that iron-air storage technology was among several options for Craig being studied once the coal plants there close. Transmission lines already exist, capable of carrying renewable energy to the site to be stored – and then released as needed.
Xcel may have gleanings about how they will act at scale and be used to manage the grid by 2026.
Will these new batteries eliminate need for expensive natural gas plants designed for use to meet peak demands? Such plants are expensive to build, and they do produce emissions. Too soon to tell, says Robert Kenney, the president of Xcel Energy’s Colorado division.
“If we see success with this program, we will explore how we can expand it and scale it up further. But to what extent it will displace ‘peaker’ plants or any other technology, that would be the learning that we would expect to come out of the pilot itself. So stay tuned.”
Thirteenth annual Conservation in the West Poll reveals voters not willing to go backwards on conservation progress to address gas prices, cost of living, or water shortages
COLORADO SPRINGS—Colorado College’s 13th annual State of the Rockies Project Conservation in the West Poll released today [February 16, 2023] shows strong support for conservation policies among Westerners even as concerns around gas prices, cost of living, drought and water shortages remain high.
The poll, which surveyed the views of voters in eight Mountain West states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), found support in the 70 to 90 percent range for conservation goals like protecting wildlife habitats and migration routes, ensuring healthier forests, preventing light pollution that blocks out the stars, and safeguarding drinking water.
From Bears Ears National Monument. Photo credit: Jonathan Thompson
82 percent of Westerners support achieving a national goal of conserving 30 percent of land and inland waters in America, and 30 percent of ocean areas, by the year 2030. Support for that proposal is up 9 percent since 2020, while opposition to the goal dropped by 5 percent during that time. In order to further conservation progress, 84 percent of Westerners support presidents continuing to use their ability to designate existing public lands as national monuments to maintain public access and protect the land and wildlife for future generations.
Voters express higher levels of concern than in the past over several issues that impact Western lifestyles. Asked what they consider to be extremely or very serious problems for their state, 65 percent of Westerners point to inadequate water supplies, 67 percent say drought, 69 percent say the low level of water in rivers, 78 percent name the rising cost of living, and 60 percent say the price of gasoline.
Those spiking concerns, however, are not dampening enthusiasm for conservation action across the West. Support remains high for a range of policies aimed at protecting land, water, air, and wildlife, including:
Highway 160 wildlife crossing 15 miles west of Pagosa Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best
85 percent support constructing wildlife crossing structures across major highways that intersect with known migration routes.
The tallest dunes in North America are the centerpiece of a diverse landscape of grasslands, wetlands, forests, alpine lakes and tundra at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. Photo credit: The Department of Interior
84 percent support creating new national parks, national monuments, and national wildlife refuges and Tribal protected areas to protect historic sites or areas of outdoor recreation.
Community solar garden in Arvada. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
67 percent support gradually transitioning to 100 percent of energy being produced from clean, renewable sources like solar and wind over the next ten to fifteen years.
Hey, World! I’m Tye, and I’ve been hiking for about 10 years. Come join me on this hiking journey throughout the state of New York. To learn more about me: https://youtu.be/GH2NqOEWJoc. Photo credit: Hiking While Black
76 percent support directing funding to ensure adequate access to parks and natural areas for lower- income people and communities of color that disproportionately lack them.
Western San Juans with McPhee Reservoir in the foreground from the Anasazi Center Dolores
85 percent support ensuring Native American Tribes have greater input into decisions made about areas on national public lands that contain sites sacred or culturally important to their Tribe.
“This year voters in the West have a lot on their minds, but they are not willing to trade one priority for another,” said Katrina Miller-Stevens, Director of the State of the Rockies Project and an associate professor at Colorado College. “High gas prices, increasing costs of living, and water shortage concerns are not enough to move Westerners to reconsider their consistent support for conservation policies or seek out short-sighted solutions that put land and water at risk. In fact, people in the West want to continue our progress to protect more outdoor spaces.”
Dories at rest on a glorious Grand Canyon eve. Photo by Brian Richter
Locally, a variety of proposed conservation efforts are even more popular with in-state voters than they were when surveyed last year. In Arizona, 62 percent of voters support legislation to make permanent the current ban on new uranium and other mining on public lands surrounding the Grand Canyon. 90 percent of Coloradans agree with protecting existing public lands surrounding the Dolores River Canyon to conserve important wildlife habitat, safeguard the area’s scenic beauty, and support outdoor recreation. 84 percent of Montanans support enacting the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act to ensure hunting and fishing access, protect stream flows into the Blackfoot River, and add eighty thousand acres of new protected public lands for recreation areas, along with timber harvest and habitat restoration. In New Mexico, 88 percent of voters want to designate existing public lands in the Caja del Rio plateau as a national conservation area to increase protections for grasslands and canyons along the Santa Fe river and other smaller rivers flowing into the Rio Grande. 83 percent of Nevadans want to designate existing public lands in southern Nevada as the Spirit Mountain National Monument to ensure outdoor recreation access and help preserve sacred Native American sites.
Voters call for bold action on water conservation in line with heightened concerns
The level of concern among Westerners around water issues remains high in this year’s poll even amidst a notable uptick in winter precipitation across the West.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Colorado River is held in high regard by voters in the states that rely on it. 86 percent say the Colorado River is critical to their state’s economy and 81 percent view it as an attraction for tourism and recreation. At the same time, 81 percent of voters say the Colorado River is at risk and in need of urgent action.
Concerns about water availability in the West translate into support for a variety of water conservation efforts, including:
95 percent support investing in water infrastructure to reduce leaks and waste. 88 percent support increasing the use of recycled water for homes and businesses.
87 percent support requiring local governments to determine whether there is enough water available before approving new residential development projects.
80 percent support providing financial incentives to homeowners and businesses to replace lawns and grassy areas with water-saving landscaping.
62 percent support prohibiting grass lawns for new developments and homes.
Rancher Bryan Bernal irrigates a field that depends on Colorado River water near Loma, Colo. Credit: William Woody
54 percent support providing financial incentives to farmers to temporarily take land out of production during severe water shortages.
Despite concerns over higher gas prices and cost of living, voters want a cleaner and safer energy future on public lands
In the face of higher gas prices and increased costs of living, Westerners still support proposals to limit the volume and impacts of oil and gas drilling on public lands.
The Four Corners methane hotspot is yet another environmental climate and public health disaster served to our community by industry. But now that we’ve identified the sources we can begin to hold those responsible accountable for cleaning up after themselves. The BLM methane rule and EPA methane rule are more clearly essential than ever. Photo credit: San Juan Citizens Alliance (2018)
91 percent support requiring oil and gas companies to use updated equipment and technology to prevent leaks of methane gas and other pollution into the air. 91 percent of voters support requiring oil and gas companies, rather than federal and state governments, to pay for all of the clean-up and land restoration costs after drilling is finished. 72 percent of voters support only allowing oil and gas companies the right to drill in areas of public land where there is a high likelihood to actually produce oil and gas.
Asked what should be the highest priority for meeting America’s energy needs, 65 percent of Westerners say it should be reducing our need for more coal, oil and gas by expanding the use of clean, renewable energy. That is compared to 32 percent who favor drilling and digging for more oil and gas wherever we can find it.
Given a choice of public lands uses facing lawmakers, 68 percent of voters prefer ensuring we protect water sources, air quality, and wildlife habitat while providing opportunities to visit and recreate on national public lands. By contrast, only 26 percent of voters would rather ensure we produce more domestic energy by maximizing the amount of national public lands available for responsible oil and gas drilling and mining.
This is the thirteenth consecutive year Colorado College gauged the public’s sentiment on public lands and conservation issues. The 2023 Colorado College Conservation in the West Poll is a bipartisan survey conducted by Republican pollster Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy and Democratic pollster Dave Metz of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates. The survey is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The poll surveyed at least 400 registered voters in each of eight Western states (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, & WY) for a total 3,413-voter sample, which included an over-sample of Black and Native American voters. The survey was conducted between January 5-22, 2023 and the effective margin of error is +2.4% at the 95% confidence interval for the total sample; and at most +4.9% for each state. The full survey and individual state surveys are available on the State of the Rockies website.
Colorado College is a nationally prominent four-year liberal arts college that was founded in Colorado Springs in 1874. The College operates on the innovative Block Plan, in which its 2,200 undergraduate students study one course at a time in intensive three and a half-week segments. For the past eighteen years, the college has sponsored the State of the Rockies Project, which seeks to enhance public understanding of and action to address socio-environmental challenges in the Rocky Mountain West through collaborative student-faculty research, education, and stakeholder engagement.
About Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates
Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates (FM3)—a national Democratic opinion research firm with offices in Oakland, Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin—has specialized in public policy oriented opinion research since 1981. The firm has assisted hundreds of political campaigns at every level of the ballot—from President to City Council—with opinion research and strategic guidance. FM3 also provides research and strategic consulting to public agencies, businesses and public interest organizations nationwide.
About New Bridge Strategy
New Bridge Strategy is a Colorado-based, woman-owned and operated opinion research company specializing in public policy and campaign research. As a Republican polling firm that has led the research for hundreds of successful political and public affairs campaigns we have helped coalitions bridging the political spectrum in crafting winning ballot measure campaigns, public education campaigns, and legislative policy efforts. New Bridge Strategy helps clients bridge divides to create winning majorities.
About Hispanic Access Foundation
Hispanic Access Foundation connects Latinos and others with partners and opportunities to improve lives and create an equitable society.
Rate of recent changes is unprecedented in at least 2000 years for many climate metrics. These changes are not natural; they are primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Monthly oil production in Colorado rebounded to over 80% of pre-pandemic levels in 2022, putting it on track to produce more oil than all but four other states.
But with employment and wages in the industry still down from 2019 highs, a new report seeks to challenge what has long been an article of faith among Colorado policymakers — arguing that rather than being a major engine of growth for the state, the oil and gas sector has only a “modest” impact on its economy overall.
The analysis from the left-leaning Colorado Fiscal Institute “shows Colorado’s oil and gas industry is in fact merely a fraction of Colorado’s diverse economy,” CFI senior economist Chris Stiffler, a co-author of the report, said in a statement.
“As of March of last year, the industry represented less than 1% of total employment and less than 2% of total wages,” Stiffler said.
The release of the report comes as Colorado lawmakers convene in Denver to begin another four-month session of the General Assembly, and debate a new slate of legislation that could impact the state’s energy industry and its ambitious goals for combating climate change.
“One the biggest barriers to these goals is the perception that Colorado is so economically reliant on the oil and gas industry that our state’s economy will prohibitively suffer if production declines,” CFI’s report says.
Past analyses published by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association have claimed that the industry accounts for as many as 89,000 local jobs. A 2021 report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute put the figure even higher, at 340,000 jobs in Colorado alone — 1 out of every 8 jobs in the state.
CFI’s report, however, faults those figures for their reliance on imprecise estimates of “indirect” and “induced” economic effects, which, the authors argue, lead to exaggerated perceptions of the potential impacts of a “gradual, managed transition” to clean energy.
Federal data show that direct employment in Colorado’s oil and gas sector declined from roughly 32,700 workers in March 2019 to about 20,500 in March 2022, or seven-tenths of one percent of total state employment.
“If the oil and gas industry in Colorado gradually declines due to market forces, regulation, or a combination of these, we can expect the economy to evolve and develop to accommodate these changes,” wrote Stiffler and report co-author Pegah Jalali. (Jalali has contributed commentaries to Newsline.)
Among the largest benefits attributable to the industry are the local property taxes paid by the owners of oil and gas assets in the handful of Colorado counties where significant production occurs. In 2021, over 43% of the property taxes collected by Weld County, home to the vast majority of Colorado’s oil production, came from oil and gas. Other counties on the gas-rich Western Slope boast similar figures — though the value of the assets can fluctuate wildly from year to year, depending on global commodity prices.
“Some counties would be disproportionately affected by (the energy transition), and Colorado will need to come together to find a solution that will support these communities,” the authors conclude.
Clean-energy goals
Advocates with 350 Colorado, a progressive climate-action group, said Friday that CFI’s report shows that “a gradual phaseout of new oil and gas permits is feasible.”
For years, environmental activists have urged Gov. Jared Polis and other Colorado policymakers to begin phasing out oil and gas production in the name of climate change — and for years Polis and other top Democrats have rejected those calls. A 2019 law increased health and safety protections for drilling but has done little to hinder production, which state officials have projected will continue to increase until at least 2030.
A biannual report released last week by the Polis administration touted progress on its “roadmap” for reducing emissions in line with targets set by a 2019 state law. Through a wide variety of voluntary measures and incentive-based regulations, the state aims to achieve a 26% overall emissions cut by 2025, and a 50% cut by 2030, though administration officials have acknowledged it’s falling behind on the 2025 goal, especially in the transportation sector.
“With momentum and progress on the initial Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap, we look forward to updating our plans and working closely with our local, in-state, and federal partners to make progress towards our climate goals and continue to lead the nation,” Polis said in a statement.
Photo: DNR Director Dan Gibbs, Gov. Polis, CWCB Director Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller at Elkhead Reservoir. Photo credit: Colorado Water Conservation Board
Proposals expected to be taken up by the Legislature this session include Polis’ request for an additional $120 million in state incentives for electric vehicles, e-bikes and electric lawn and garden equipment, as well as additional measures aimed at tackling Colorado’s ozone pollution problem. State Sen. Chris Hansen, a Democrat from Denver, told journalist Allen Best this week that he will introduce a bill to set an interim emissions-cutting target of 65% by 2035.
The potential of long-term declines in oil and gas property taxes could also loom over discussions about updating Colorado’s school funding formula. Advocates continue to press for a “just transition” that protects workers and residents in fossil-fuel-dependent communities as the energy transition accelerates.
“Unfortunately, we’re already seeing the incredible cost of delaying a transition away from pollution-causing fuels to clean energy,” Jalali said in a statement. “This report will give lawmakers a clearer picture of which communities — especially which school districts — will need the most attention in the years to come.”
