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Tag: climate

  • Opinion | How to Make Climate Change a Bipartisan Priority

    Opinion | How to Make Climate Change a Bipartisan Priority

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    We simply cannot wait that long to pass additional climate legislation. The stakes are too high and the time is too short, especially in light of increasingly frequent and visible climate impacts. So relying exclusively on Democrats for continued climate progress would be a strategic blunder. Bipartisanship is the only assured path to decarbonizing at scale and speed.

    Despite this reality, the climate movement has done far too little to lay the groundwork for bipartisan action. For years, philanthropists have poured money into progressive climate groups, while largely overlooking opportunities to engage right-of-center communities on this topic. The data bear this out. According to an analysis by Northeastern University, less than 2 percent of climate philanthropy has gone to engaging conservatives on climate change. On a very practical level, this imbalance misses an opportunity to build a broader tent and delays the elevation of climate as a bipartisan priority.

    As former GOP congressmen eager to see further movement on climate, we know firsthand how difficult it can be to mobilize Republicans on this issue. Some of the blame lies within our own party, which has been too skeptical on climate action for too long. But without real engagement from the environmental movement, it becomes easy for our Republican colleagues to dismiss the issue as a liberal concern rather than a challenge confronting us all.

    In its work on climate change, the Democratic Party is guided by a formidable civil society apparatus — including think tanks, grassroots organizations and more — that pushes, pulls and applauds Democrats as they act on this issue.

    There is little equivalent on the right. The small assemblage of organizations that make up the “eco-right,” while growing, receive only a fraction of the funding that left-of-center groups do. If environmental leaders are genuinely committed to emboldening bipartisan action in support of increasingly ambitious policy, this must change. Far more resources need to be invested in building the kind of infrastructure that can rally conservatives to climate action.

    Already, advocacy by the eco-right has demonstrated its ability to move the political needle. Just in the last few years, dozens of Republicans have joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucuses in both chambers of Congress; the newly formed Conservative Climate Caucus in the House now includes a third of the GOP conference.

    These efforts have also produced concrete legislation, including the bipartisan Growing Climate Solutions Act, which passed the Senate with 92 votes. Several other bills, including the Financing Our Energy Future Act, Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, Protecting and Securing Florida’s Coastline Act, and National Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy Act, have also garnered bipartisan support.

    The Energy Act of 2020, which earned strong support from both parties, directs the EPA to reduce HFC gasses 85 percent by 2035. This measure will help limit global warming by a full half of a degree Celsius — one of the most significant climate actions in history. Additionally, the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in the last Congress includes an array of low carbon and clean energy measures.

    There are meaningful, bipartisan victories to be achieved for those who seek them. This requires an openness to market-based solutions and a deeper commitment to climate engagement across the political spectrum.

    Especially as philanthropic commitments to address climate change grow — including a new initiative announced this year at Davos — right-of-center climate engagement must be a core part of the portfolio.

    One important place to start is in red states, where climate organizing, especially by trusted messengers, has paled in comparison to the vigor and energy of advocacy in blue states. At the end of the day, lawmakers are responsive to the voters in their own states and districts. Only with a greater mandate to lead, in Republican and Democratic districts alike, can we create the conditions necessary for bipartisan action on Capitol Hill.

    While climate change is a unique and paramount challenge, the laws of political gravity remain the same. Legislative outcomes are born from the political infrastructure supporting them. If bipartisan climate solutions are our goal, then we must build toward them.

    From the nexus of climate and trade to pollution pricing to natural climate solutions, there are many promising areas for bipartisan progress. But unless the environmental community embraces this mandate, and dedicates resources and attention accordingly, we will fail to meet the responsibilities of our moment in history.

    This is the environmental movement’s vulnerability, but also its opportunity. Building bipartisan routes forward on climate won’t be easy. But it is the work that can, and must, be done.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • GOP’s newest attack on Biden’s climate law: China

    GOP’s newest attack on Biden’s climate law: China

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    To Democrats, such projects and the domestic manufacturing incentives included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are the key to creating a homegrown clean energy industry that will end China’s dominance, while weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels. But Republicans contend that the president is recklessly pushing a quick transition away from coal, oil and natural gas — and toward green-energy sources that China dominates.

    The GOP strategy plays off anger at China among lawmakers in both parties, which spiked again this month after a suspected Chinese spy balloon wafted across the U.S. before the Air Force shot it down.

    “We want to stop the rush to green,” said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), chair of the Energy and Commerce environment, manufacturing and critical materials subcommittee. Under Biden’s policies, he contended, “Energy costs are going to go higher. Quality of life for the American people is going to go down. America’s economy and energy independence is at stake. Let’s harvest those resources as much as we can here at home.”

    Energy experts and members of both parties acknowledge that the U.S. cannot yet make a full break from China, which has had a decade-long head start in developing the supply chain for batteries, solar panels and other clean energy production.

    But Democrats say their efforts are directed at replacing Chinese batteries and renewable equipment with U.S.-made parts. They say the attacks from Republicans, who unanimously voted against the climate law, are a transparent attempt to undermine alternatives to fossil fuels.

    “Republicans sat on the sidelines while we took these huge steps in the direction of being less dependent on China,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) “So they have no high ground whatsoever on this.”

    Supporters of Biden’s policies also warn that an immediate no-China approach would be a recipe for paralysis — slowing the U.S. transition to clean energy, leaving the country without crucial materials, and imperiling the fight to cut planet-warming pollution.

    “We can’t make our emissions numbers without solar panels that can only come from China today,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), a former environmental lawyer who serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

    “Being wary of them is really important, but the notion that you can just flush your contact with China is not possible,” he added. “You have to manage China. There’s going to be a period of transition. They are still going to be a very large economy.”

    The flight of the balloon has only worsened U.S.-China acrimony. Beijing also temporarily cut off climate talks and other contacts with the U.S. last year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, while China’s growing ties to the Russian energy sector have provoked consternation in Washington since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine a year ago.

    China’s starring role in clean energy is undeniable, however.

    On top of its world-leading position in processing critical minerals and manufacturing solar cells, wafers and modules, China dominates the production of the batteries needed for electric vehicles at every stage of the supply chain, according to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency.

    “We are still in a tight coupling with China, and it isn’t rational or responsible to talk about that relationship like we can turn it off,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a research group.

    China hosts about three-quarters of the global production capacity for battery cells, along with more than half the global raw material processing of lithium, cobalt and graphite, the IEA said.

    Its stranglehold on the polysilicon wafers that turn sunlight into electricity in solar panels is even greater, accounting for 97 percent of the global manufacturing capacity. Lawmakers last year also enacted a federal law that prohibits the importation of goods that include polysilicon from China’s Xinjiang unless an importer can prove the product was not made with forced labor.

    Since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August, companies have announced plans for tens of billions of dollars of green manufacturing projects across the United States, seeking a slice of the law’s $369 billion in incentives for domestically sourced clean energy.

    But those projects are also drawing scrutiny from GOP lawmakers. They’ve promised a lengthy oversight process of the green energy spending bonanza bankrolled through the climate law, as well as investments stemming from Biden’s 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

    “I won’t use the phrase this is the tip of the iceberg, but I would say this is the start of a long and methodical and hopefully sterile process of oversight,” said House Science Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.).

    Lucas, and other lawmakers from both parties, have raised questions about China’s influence over a Texas-based battery company, Microvast, which has received initial approval for a $200 million federal grant through the infrastructure law to build a facility in Tennessee.

    Microvast is a publicly traded U.S. company with a subsidiary in China, but with no ownership by the Chinese government, said Shane Smith, the company’s chief operating officer. The Energy Department has said no taxpayer funds have gone to the company yet, and that DOE is conducting a due-diligence review of the award.

    Smith said the company, which has worked with DOE since the Trump administration, is now being used to score political points — though he acknowledged that some companies with links to China are worth investigating.

    “Frankly, we’re just the wrong company,” he said. “Are there companies out there that are blatantly acknowledged that are Chinese-owned, that could get actual federal dollars? Yes. Why are those not the examples in what they’re trying to communicate rather than an American company?”

    Conservatives and GOP state lawmakers have also begun drawing links between China and investments in their states. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced last month that he had halted efforts to bring a proposed Ford battery plant to Virginia over concerns about its links to a Chinese company and its technology. The U.S.-based auto giant said Monday that it would locate the project in Michigan instead.

    In West Virginia, a Republican state delegate has questioned whether investors in a proposed battery plant there have connections to China and Saudi Arabia.

    One solar energy industry executive pointed to conservative ire over a recent announcement that JA Solar, a China-based company that is one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers, will build a factory in Arizona. “The suggestion there is that IRA funds could potentially be going to companies linked to the Communist Party,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the industry’s concerns. The person added, “Our concern is that any link to China is going to be a problem.”

    But the person saw a potential bright spot: Because anti-China sentiment on the Hill is bipartisan, an opportunity could exist to channel that energy to advance manufacturing investments — if lawmakers were open to having a meaningful discussion.

    Republicans, meanwhile, say Biden’s actions are undermining his stated support for developing domestic sources of critical clean-energy minerals. They point to a recent Interior Department order protecting a swath of lakes and wilderness in Minnesota, which effectively halted a proposed copper mine.

    Less than a week later, EPA used a rarely employed veto authority to stop Pebble Mine in Alaska, a contentious metals project that would have extracted significant amounts of copper, gold and molybdenum but risked damaging one of the world’s largest salmon habitats

    “The fact they would shut those down demonstrates the phoniness of the conviction of all this, especially with regards to [reducing dependence on] China,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).

    Republicans also warn that Democrats’ subsidies to clean energy developers can’t keep up with China’s government support of its own green industries, and that the U.S. won’t be able to quickly build energy and mining projects unless Congress passes legislation to streamline lengthy permitting reviews.

    “You can’t compete with a nonmarket behemoth economy in a game of subsidies,” said George David Banks, a former international climate adviser in the Trump administration who now advises Republicans in Congress. “You can throw all the subsidies and still not be able to solve the problem because you can’t build anything.”

    Democrats counter that Republicans have not offered a comprehensive plan of their own. They say the GOP’s focus on boosting domestic mining overlooks other aspects of the supply chain reliant on China, such as processing of metals used in batteries.

    And they say the GOP’s emphasis on easing fossil fuel production and exports risks setting back U.S efforts to compete with China.

    “[Republicans] need a plan, and the plan needs to be a real plan not a political plan — a nuts and bolts, how do we continue to onshore manufacturing here,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “And right now we have the only real tool to do that, which is the industrial policy which was embedded in the IRA.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • What climate law? Voters clueless about Biden’s top achievement

    What climate law? Voters clueless about Biden’s top achievement

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    The sales pitch for Biden’s signature legislation would be crucial to any reelection effort he wages in 2024. But polls show that few Americans are aware of the climate law and how it could benefit them — creating a political challenge that the president’s Democratic allies acknowledge.

    “If we can’t figure out how to sell that story over the next two years, we should find a different job,” Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Tom Carper (D-Del.), whose committee wrote a sizable chunk of the law, said in an interview. “And I don’t have any plans to find a different job.”

    It won’t be an easy task.

    A third of registered voters have heard “nothing at all” about the climate law, while another 24 percent heard “a little” and 29 percent heard “some,” according to a Yale Project on Climate Change Communication poll conducted in December. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday found that 62 percent of Americans thought Biden had accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.”

    “I really feel sympathy with the president,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told POLITICO. “You do really important things that might have an impact and there’s a day or two of news coverage. If important political points are not getting out to the public, it’s not just the politicians’ fault.”

    Republicans are offering no condolences — including lawmakers whose districts are poised to host many of the jobs the legislation would create. They contend that the law, H.R. 5376 (117th), has stoked inflation that is burdening households with high gasoline, food and home-heating prices.

    “It has made the lives of American people, American families more difficult and it doesn’t matter how much spin the president puts on it — it’s been two years of failure,” said House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania, who like every other congressional Republican opposed the measure.

    The Biden administration is employing two approaches to sell the law’s benefits to a largely unaware public — an effort that will take officials on the road and into people’s homes.

    Biden, a self-professed “car guy,” has promoted the law and its tax credits for electric vehicles at public events such as the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and in appearances on Jay Leno’s Garage. On Wednesday, Biden spoke at a Laborers’ International Union of North America training center in Deforest, Wis., about new manufacturing jobs.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited Ultium Cells in Spring Hill, Tenn., on Wednesday to champion new domestic battery manufacturing sparked by the climate law. EPA Administrator Michael Regan headed to Wabaunsee, Kan., that same day to talk electric school buses. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is on a three-state swing through Friday across Utah, Nevada and Massachusetts.

    Granholm also made Thursday’s announcement of the $2 billion battery-materials loan, which will come from a 2007 DOE program that got additional funding and authority from Biden’s climate law. The company, Redwood Materials, said the loan would fund projects creating jobs in Nevada and Kansas.

    “We have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 U.S. governors working to help the administration slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half from 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

    The focus on the middle of the country is intentional. The Biden administration championed the climate law as a jobs boon for blue-collar workers that will ease consumers’ financial burden during the country’s transition to clean energy.

    “We’ve already created 800,000 manufacturing jobs even without this law. With this new law, we will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs across the country,” Biden said in the State of the Union speech, noting Intel’s plans to build a semiconductor factory outside Columbus, Ohio. That project will bring jobs that pay workers $130,000 a year, including for many positions that don’t require a college degree, he noted.

    Since Biden signed the law in August, 100,000 new job postings sprouted across 31 states and 94 clean energy projects have drawn $89.5 billion in new investment, according to an analysis by Climate Power, a coalition of environmental groups. Biden administration officials and Democrats widely promoted the study, which was released Monday.

    Many of those jobs are in districts represented by GOP lawmakers who opposed the legislation.

    Among other political headwinds, though, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said many Americans are simply exhausted from years of crises such as the coronavirus pandemic, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, two impeachments of former President Donald Trump and protests about police brutality and racial justice.

    “To the extent that the mood improves — and I think it is and it will continue to — I think that overwhelmingly benefits the party that has the White House,” Kaine said in an interview.

    Meanwhile, Biden and his team are working to inform people about the economic gains the climate law promises. They’ve also added a consumer outreach official who is tasked with making it easier for the average American to take advantage of the law’s rebates, tax credits and other incentives.

    Many of the law’s tax benefits, such as rebates for home improvements and appliance upgrades, won’t be felt until a year from now when Americans file their 2023 returns. Lawmakers, regulators and U.S. allies are still fighting over which electric vehicles should qualify for a $7,500 credit.

    Joshua Peck, senior policy adviser on the White House implementation team for the climate law, said it’s not essential for Americans to know the legislation’s name — but they “need to see and feel benefits, and know that they are part of the president’s agenda.”

    “Over the next year or two, so many of those accomplishments will be happening on top of each other,” Peck said.

    Don’t expect splashy public service announcements or advertising. Peck and his team are working behind the scenes organizing businesses, trade associations, equipment manufacturers and state energy offices to bring awareness to the opportunities the law affords.

    The idea is to spread the word that more energy efficient, cleaner options are available, which begins with educating people like heating and cooling contractors, tradespeople and electric utilities about ways they can inform customers of savings.

    The White House’s environmental allies are also looking to help.

    “It was just signed into law a matter of months ago. It’s a big, complex law,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs with the League of Conservation Voters. “It’s incumbent on all of us to make clear to people all across the country the ways that — not the ins and outs or getting into the weeds of the legislation — but how does it benefit them? How does it save them money on their monthly energy bills? What are the rebates for making their home more efficient or electrifying the homes?”

    Of course, that message runs up against Republican warnings that Biden is out to abolish traditional touchstones of Americans’ lives — including gas stoves along with older, inefficient, toilets, dishwashers, showerheads and incandescent light bulbs.

    Rewiring America, a nonprofit whose work has been influential within the White House Climate Policy Office, has partnered with Redfin and Airbnb to get the message out to 10 million Americans about the benefits of converting appliances and homes to run off electric power rather than gas — tasks the climate law will make more affordable.

    People already are curious: 400,000 people have used a tool on the website of Rewiring America run by a green advocacy group that calculates potential savings from the law. Those visitors all came to the tool by word of mouth and news articles, said Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America.

    “If the policy is effective it is going to be embedded in the transactions that people are making and these electric machines are increasingly going to become the default,” Matusiak said. “That’s the actual goal — that it becomes the kind of no-brainer decision.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • G20: First Environment and Climate Sustainability meeting in Bengaluru from Feb 9

    G20: First Environment and Climate Sustainability meeting in Bengaluru from Feb 9

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    Bengaluru: The first Environment and Climate Sustainability Working Group (ECSWG) meeting, under India’s G20 presidency, will be held here from February 9 to 11.

    Hosted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the conference will be chaired by Secretary in the ministry, Leena Nandan.

    With the goal of adopting an integrated, comprehensive and consensus-driven approach to tackling the challenges of climate change, several delegates from G20 countries along with representatives of international organisations will participate in this meeting.

    As a matter of priority, the working group will be focusing on arresting land degradation, accelerating ecosystem restoration, and enriching biodiversity; promoting a sustainable and climate-resilient blue economy; and encouraging resource efficiency and circular economy.

    LiFE is an “important and cross cutting” theme across all three priorities, officials said, adding that the three-day meeting includes an event on ecosystem restoration and biodiversity enrichment practices. The subsequent meetings will take place at Gandhinagar, Mumbai and Chennai.

    The G20 or Group of 20 is an intergovernmental forum of the world’s major developed and developing economies. Over 200 G20 meetings on various themes are scheduled to be held during the country’s year-long presidency of the influential group which will culminate with an annual summit in New Delhi on September 9 and 10.

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    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Europe moves from anger toward acceptance of U.S. climate law

    Europe moves from anger toward acceptance of U.S. climate law

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    The visit is a marked shift in tone from previous engagements. French President Emmanuel Macron accused the U.S. of “hurting” his country when Congress passed its landmark Inflation Reduction Act.

    European officials had initially pushed President Joe Biden and senior U.S. lawmakers to make the law more inclusive of European companies. The law provides $369 billion in subsidies and tax credits that aim to incentivize purchases of electric vehicles and build up green infrastructure. One of the most hotly contested provisions, a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, is limited to cars built in North America and with battery critical minerals sourced domestically or from a free trade agreement partner — which the EU is not.

    Habeck and Le Maire say they haven’t given up that campaign. But in the face of uncertainty about how far the Biden administration will go to address their concerns, the officials said the European Union, one America’s most important trading partners, deserves at least a transparent accounting of how the U.S. government will use the law to funnel money to industry.

    “We agreed on the necessity of full transparency on the level of subsidies and tax credits,” Le Maire told reporters after the meetings, as well as “necessity to ensure constant communication at the ministerial level, especially on the strategy on tax credits.”

    “You cannot have any fair competition if there is not full transparency on the level of public subsidies and public tax credits that are granted to private companies,” he added.

    But outside of pledges for transparency and cooperation, the meetings with U.S. officials did not appear to yield any concrete agreement to alleviate the EU’s top concern with the IRA — the North American assembly requirement for subsidized electric vehicles.

    Le Maire said the sides agreed in principle that the “implementation of the IRA should include as many EU components as possible.” But he declined to detail if that meant the U.S. had budged on the EV tax credit terms, or if they would seek to maximize EU parts under existing the parameters.

    The economic dustup has shown how complex and potentially adversarial the race toward a clean energy future will be. Even as they pursue their own self-interests, economies like the U.S. and EU have at least one shared goal beyond slowing climate change: ensuring China does not dominate supply chains for battery production and renewables.

    For their part, European nations are already developing their own subsidy scheme to prevent a feared migration of EU manufacturing to the U.S., where energy costs are lower and states are standing by with sweeteners to dish out. After meeting with U.S. officials, the ministers said the need for Europe to respond with its own subsidy package is clearer than ever.

    “One conclusion we have to draw from the meetings,” Le Maire said, is that “we see the absolute necessity for Europe to arrive at the definition and implementation of a European green tech plan.”

    U.S. officials have encouraged the EU to boost its own industries, often noting there is ample room in the market for widespread government support for clean energy.

    A Treasury Department readout of the meeting said Yellen stressed the need for innovation and development of technology “on both sides of the Atlantic to speed the transition to green energy and meet our collective climate goals.”

    The Treasury Department provided preliminary guidance in late December on how it is going to implement key features of the electric vehicle tax credits and promised complete details in March. In a win for the EU, it hinted at adopting an expansive definition of which countries are considered U.S. free trade agreement partners. It also said imported electric vehicles would be eligible for a separate credit for commercial clean vehicles. However, many legal experts said it’s unlikely the administration could bend the law any further.

    The German and French officials emphasized a promise to cooperate on creating a common market for the components that go into many clean energy products, with Habeck hailing the creation of a “critical minerals club” between the trading partners. France and Germany had already agreed last year to join a “minerals security partnership” to bolster critical mineral supply chains.

    “The idea is we will find concrete measures … on how we reach more diversity in the supply chain,” Habeck said. “If that is reached, then we might have the steps for further agreements, for further alignment for the goods that are produced out of the critical minerals.”

    Habeck and Le Maire also met Tuesday with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who played a key role in crafting the final details of the IRA, particularly the electric vehicle consumer tax credit.

    Speaking at an online event hosted by the news outlet Semafor before that meeting, Manchin defended the IRA bill as an important step toward achieving U.S. energy security and said it was never his or Congress’ intention to hurt Europe.

    “We can bring them in to basically participating [in the IRA provisions],” Manchin said. “But every country does what they can to stimulate their market, to keep their people working, to have a strong economy. They can’t deny us from doing the same thing.”

    Manchin also encouraged European officials to offer incentives to increase investment in clean energy and technologies to fight climate change. He expressed concern the EU wants “to continue to beat the living crap out of people by charging carbon taxes, carbon fees and everything [else they’re] doing, rather than giving them incentives, basically, to mature these industries quicker.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • In from the coal: Australia sheds climate pariah status to make up with Europe

    In from the coal: Australia sheds climate pariah status to make up with Europe

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    Europe loves the Aussies again. 

    Australia was, until recently, an international pariah on climate change and a punchline in Brussels. But a new government in Canberra coupled with Europe’s energy and economic woes mean a better relationship is now emerging — one that could fuel Europe’s transition to a clean economy, while enriching Australia immensely.

    “Europe is energy hungry and capital rich, Australia’s energy rich and capital hungry, and that means that there’s a lot that we can do together,” said Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.

    A little over a year ago, relations between Australia and the EU were in a parlous state. The government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison had reneged on a nuclear submarine contract — a decision the current government stands by — incensing the French and by extension the EU. Equally as frustrating for many Europeans was Australia’s climate policy, which was viewed as outstandingly meager even in a lackluster global field.

    The election of Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — whose father was Italian — last May brought a change in tone, as well as a new climate target and a trickle of policies designed to cut greenhouse gas pollution that heats up the planet.

    Those moves were “the entry ticket” to dealings with Europe, Bowen told POLITICO in Brussels, the second-last stop on a European tour. “Australia’s change of climate positioning, climate policy, has changed our position in the world.”

    That’s been most notable in progress on talks on a free trade agreement with the EU. Landing that deal would be a “big step forward,” said Bowen. Particularly because when it comes to clean energy, Australia wants to sell and Europe wants to buy.

    Using the vast sunny desert in its interior, Australia could be a “renewable energy superpower,” Bowen argued. Solar energy can be tapped to make green hydrogen and shipped to Europe, he said.

    European governments are listening closely to the pitch. Bowen was in Rotterdam on Monday, inspecting the potential to use the Netherlands port as an entry for antipodean hydrogen. He signed a provisional deal with the Dutch government to that end. Last week, Bowen announced a series of joint investments with the German government in Australian hydrogen research projects worth €72 million.

    It’s not just sun, Australia has tantalum and tungsten and a host of minerals Europe needs for building clean tech, but that it currently imports. In many cases those minerals are refined or otherwise processed in China, a dependency that Brussels is keen to rapidly unwind — not least with its Critical Raw Materials Act, expected in March.

    According to a 2022 government report, Australia holds the second-largest global reserves of cobalt and lithium, from which batteries are made, and is No. 1 in zirconium, which is used to line nuclear reactors.

    Asked whether Australia can ease Europe’s dependence on China, Bowen said: “We want to be a very strong factor in the supply chains. We’re a trusted, reliable trading partner. We have strong ethical supply chains. We have strong environmental standards.”

    But Australia has its own entanglements.

    Certain Australian minerals, notably lithium, are largely refined and manufactured in China. Bowen said he was keen on bringing at least some of that resource-intensive, polluting work back to Australia.

    While its climate targets are now broadly in line with other rich nations, the rehabilitation of Australia’s climate image jars with its role as one of the biggest fossil fuel sellers on the planet.

    Australia’s coal exports, when burned in overseas power plants, generate huge amounts of planet-warming pollution — almost double the amount produced annually by Australians within their borders. Australia is also the third-largest exporter of natural gas, including an increasing flow to the EU. At home, the government is facing calls from the Greens party and centrist climate independents to reject plans for more than 100 coal and gas developments around the country.

    But how many of Bowen’s counterparts raised the issue of Australia’s emissions during his travels around Europe? “Nobody,” he said. “We are here to help.”

    Antonia Zimmermann contributed reporting.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

  • ‘Climate change, global warming impacted tea plantation in Assam’

    ‘Climate change, global warming impacted tea plantation in Assam’

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    Guwahati: Climate change and global warming have adversely affected tea plantations in Assam in the last few years, experts said, adding that without irrigation, tea plantations are finding it difficult to survive.

    P. Soman, senior agronomist and plant physiology expert, said that climate change is one of the top five challenges of the tea industry in Assam.

    Soman, as a key speaker at a workshop at Golaghat, explained in depth “how changes in agronomy help micro irrigation technology to enhance crop performance”.

    Tea plantations are highly climate dependent, he pointed out.

    Speaking in the workshop, technical expert Vinay Radhakrishnan highlighted the importance of hydro pneumatic pumps of advanced technology.

    The Tea Academy of North East Tea Association’s (NETA) has organised the two-day workshop on “Importance of Technology driven irrigation and fertigation in Tea” at the NETA headquarters at Golaghat.

    Piyush Gattani, CEO of MD’s Organic (Distributor of Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd), highlighted the cost economics of installing drip irrigation with fertigation and automation in tea.

    Senior tea planter from West Bengal, Shiv Saria, shared his broad experience and benefits he gained by using micro-irrigation in tea plantations.

    Jain Irrigation Systems, for the first time in India, installed drip irrigation with fertigation and automation at around 100 hectares of tea plantation successfully in Assam’s Karbi Anglong.

    Jain Irrigation is also working hand in hand with the tea plantation to introduce the latest precision micro-irrigation technology or need-based irrigation system.

    In this system, the decision to irrigate and fertigate an agricultural field is derived based on inputs received from satellite field data, soil moisture sensors and other applications, NETA Advisor Bidyananda Barkakoty said.

    He said that the two-day workshop was an eye opener to new possibilities of sustainable agricultural development and a way to deal with challenges faced by the tea farmers of Assam.

    Assam, which produces roughly 55 per cent of India’s tea, has more than 10 lakh tea workers in the organised sector, working in about 850 big estates.

    Besides, there are lakhs of small tea gardens owned by individuals.

    The tea belts of Assam’s Brahmaputra and Barak Valley are home to more than 60 lakh people.

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    #Climate #change #global #warming #impacted #tea #plantation #Assam

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Power Minister urges G20 members to counter climate change challenges unitedly

    Power Minister urges G20 members to counter climate change challenges unitedly

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    R.K. Singh feb5

    New Delhi: Power Minister R.K. Singh on Sunday called upon G20 member countries to join together in countering the challenges posed by global warming and climate change.

    Delivering the keynote address at the first Energy Transitions Working Group (ETWG) meeting in Bengaluru, he said that India now stands committed to reduce emissions intensity of GDP by 45 percent by 2030 from 2005 level.

    He said that the country also aims to achieve close to 50 percent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030.

    Noting that India has been ranked amongst the top five performing countries in the Climate Change Performance Index, the Power Minister said that the country’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are far below the world average of 6.3 tCO2e in 2020.

    Various energy saving schemes of the government have led to 267.9 million tonnes of CO2 reduction per year, resulting in an estimated cost savings of $18.5 billion, he added.

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    #Power #Minister #urges #G20 #members #counter #climate #change #challenges #unitedly

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Shrinking Colorado River hands Biden his first climate brawl

    Shrinking Colorado River hands Biden his first climate brawl

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    The current feud centers on California, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and Arizona, a newfound swing state that has proven crucial to the party’s control of the White House and Senate.

    The 1,450-mile long Colorado River made much of the West inhabitable, and now supplies water to 40 million Americans from Wyoming to the border with Mexico, as well as an enormously productive agricultural industry. But climate change has shriveled its flows by 20 percent over the past two decades, and for each additional degree of warming, scientists predict the river will shrink another 9 percent.

    Water levels at the system’s two main reservoirs are falling so fast, the Interior Department has said that water users must cut consumption by as much as a third of the river’s flows or risk a collapse that could cripple their ability to deliver water out of those dams. That would also cut off hydropower production that is crucial to the stability of the Western grid.

    The states broadly agree that the vast majority of those immediate cuts must be made by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, whose decades of overuse have accelerated the crisis. But the fight is over whether California, which holds strong legal rights to the lion’s share of the Lower Basin’s water, should have to share in those reductions.

    This week, six of the seven states along the river asked the Biden administration to spread the cuts among the Lower Basin’s water users. They argued, in effect, that climate change has so fundamentally altered the waterway that the century-old legal system governing who must sacrifice in times of shortage should not be the final word in how those cuts are divvied up.

    But California, whose major agricultural regions would be among the last to take cuts under the existing rules, is refusing to budge from its legal claim. Its rival proposal for apportioning the pain would almost entirely cut off Colorado River deliveries to Phoenix, Tucson and the 11 Native American tribes getting water from central Arizona’s primary canal before California’s agricultural users would face any mandatory cuts.

    “We agree there needs to be reduced use in the Lower Basin, but that can’t be done by just completely ignoring and sidestepping federal law,” said J.B. Hamby, who leads the Colorado River Board of California and serves on the board of the state’s biggest user of the river’s water, the Imperial Irrigation District.

    But Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, argued that his state agreed to take junior rights to river water back in 1968, before climate change was known to be a factor in shrinking the river’s flow.

    “Why should Arizona in the Lower Basin take the entire cost of climate change changes to the river?” he asked.

    The state-level politics, alone, are a disaster for a Democratic administration.

    On one side of the fight is the most populous state in the country with a $3.4 trillion economy, fueled in large part by its powerhouse agricultural sector. A Democratic stronghold run by a governor with his own presidential ambitions, California has also enacted some of the most aggressive climate mitigation policies in the country.

    On the other side is Arizona — a swing state on which Democrats’ national electoral fate could turn — joined by every other state in the river basin.

    And while the immediate fight is centered on Arizona and California, the Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, which backed Arizona’s approach, have their own interest in moving toward a more flexible interpretation of century-old water rules. Climate change is expected to soon make it impossible for them to deliver the legally required amount of water to the Lower Basin without draconian cuts to their own cities and tribes — an even bigger brawl that will have to be fought out in the next two years.

    But within each state, the fault lines aren’t always clear. Since Western water law allows whoever claimed the water first to be first in line, agricultural users often hold some of the strongest rights, whereas cities and suburbs are almost always the first to take cuts.

    Meanwhile, notably absent from the dueling proposals were any of the 29 tribes that reside within the river basin, and whose interests the Biden administration has vowed to be particularly attentive to. They haven’t been in the room for negotiations involving the states and the federal government.

    Tribal interests on the river are also complex and competing: The Gila River Indian Community, whose ancestors farmed with Colorado River water for millennia, are among those most vulnerable to cuts under the priority approach backed by California. But the Colorado River Indian Tribes hold senior rights decreed by the Supreme Court that align their interests with the Golden State’s approach.

    Environmentalists are also likely to enter the fight soon, with the fate of nearly three dozen endangered species hanging on the line and a risk that the Grand Canyon could one day have no river running through it.

    Adding to the pressure on the Biden administration is the fact that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are increasingly jumping into the fray.

    Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won reelection last fall in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country after staking out an aggressive position defending his state’s Colorado River water interests — and fighting California’s. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Arizona and Nevada this week wrote Biden to endorse their states’ “consensus” proposal, calling it “a roadmap to avoid devastating economic impacts while sharing in the sacrifice of adapting to a permanently reduced water supply.”

    But California’s Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla shot back in a statement contending that “six other Western states dictating how much water California must give up simply isn’t a genuine consensus solution.” Feinstein has for years wielded intense power over Western water issues on Capitol Hill and chairs the appropriations panel overseeing water funding.

    The Biden administration won’t have to make any tough decision on who wins and who loses just yet, though. First, the Interior Department will need to publicly lay out exactly what effect the competing approaches would mean to communities and ecosystems across the West if the next few years turn out to be dry ones.

    The analysis is part of the National Environmental Policy Act process that Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation launched in October to give itself legal cover if the states can’t reach agreement among themselves and the Biden administration decides it must act unilaterally — which it has indicated it could do as soon as this summer.

    “The Department remains committed to pursuing a collaborative and consensus-based approach, and ongoing conversations with the Basin states, Tribes, water managers, farmers, irrigators and other stakeholders are helping to inform the supplemental process to revise the current interim operating guidelines for the operation of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams,” Interior spokesperson Tyler Cherry said by email.

    Some of the state negotiators think this process of publicly detailing the exact risks and costs to communities of the two competing concepts could help energize the negotiations among the states.

    If the analysis of California’s proposal shows the result would be “drying up the Central Arizona Project [and] major metropolitan areas and taking all of the water away from native American tribes, I think the choices will become really stark,” said John Entsminger, Nevada’s top Colorado River negotiator.

    “I definitely think there’s still a chance for a seven-state agreement, and I think the modeling outputs that are going to be public could be very helpful for helping drive some form of compromise,” he said.

    Regardless of how the negotiations turn out and what Interior decides, many legal experts expect the fight to ultimately land in court.

    “No matter what that decision is, one or more of the states is going to sue the Bureau of Reclamation and we’re going to have to work this out through litigation,” said Rhett Larson, who teaches water law at the Arizona State University and has worked on water rights issues along the Colorado River.

    But while a legal battle may be the only way to resolve some of the longstanding conflicts among the river’s users, it could also slow down the federal government’s ability to respond to a fast-evolving crisis on the Colorado River.

    Even more concerning to federal, state and local water managers is the risk that a court decision, particularly from the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, could end up curtailing the federal government’s broad authorities to manage not just the Colorado River, but waterways across the West. This would be occurring at a time when climate change requires flexibility to adapt to hydrologic systems that are evolving in unprecedented and unpredictable ways.

    “The court could impose real limits on its ability to adapt existing laws to hydrologic and climatologic realities,” Larson said. “That’s something that the Bureau of Reclamation doesn’t want to do for practical reasons — climate change is changing our hydrologic systems and we need to be able to adapt it — and also for institutional reasons. No one likes to give up power.”

    Reporter Camille von Kaenel contributed to this report.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • A Plan for Blowing Up U.S. Climate Politics

    A Plan for Blowing Up U.S. Climate Politics

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    Fay pointed to Evan McMullin, the former intelligence officer then mounting an independent campaign in Utah against Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican. McMullin’s signature issue was defending democracy against the extreme right; Democrats had made way for his candidacy by declining to field a nominee of their own. Could there not be an Evan McMullin for the cause of planetary survival?

    It was a provocative idea, even an outlandish one. Nothing in recent American history suggests a plan like that would have a fair chance of working.

    Australian politics tells a different story.

    In Fay’s home country, that strategy has already succeeded. In Australia’s elections last May, a slate of independent candidates stepped forward to challenge the ruling conservatives in some of their electoral strongholds. Nicknamed the teals from the color of their campaign materials, these upstarts battered the sitting government for resisting climate action and helped drive Scott Morrison, then the prime minister, from power.

    Aiding the teals was a heavily funded environmental group, Climate 200, which spent millions in the election. It is backed by an outspoken investor, Simon Holmes à Court, and Fay is its executive director.

    The September gathering helped mark a new phase in climate politics that has arrived with too little notice. For the first time in memory, green forces in different countries have as much to learn from each others’ breakaway successes as they do from studying their noble failures. They are no longer engaged in a long, tired struggle to make voters care about global warming. They have real momentum on multiple continents, manifested in election results from Washington to Warringah.

    Their task now is to drive the planet’s clean-energy transition faster and faster. It is a moment that calls for a spirit of experimentation and a willingness to test the assumed boundaries of electoral politics at home.

    In some quarters that process is already underway. A political feedback loop has been developing between environmentalists in the United States and Australia, as well as the United Kingdom — a kind of informal distance-learning program for climate campaigners.

    Watching Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, leaders of the Australian Labor Party absorbed how Biden talked about climate change not just as an environmental crisis but also as an economic opportunity. In Australia’s next election, Labor leader Anthony Albanese promised to make his country a “clean energy superpower” and accused the right-wing Liberal Party of clinging to old thinking and squandering a prosperous future. The message helped make Albanese prime minister, with the teal independents playing a dramatic supporting role in the campaign.

    Last October, weeks after Fay’s meeting in Washington, senior officials of Albanese’s Labor Party, including the national secretary Paul Erickson and Wayne Swan, a former deputy prime minister, visited Liverpool for the British Labour Party’s annual conference. Meeting with advisers to Keir Starmer, Britain’s opposition party leader, the Australians outlined their winning blueprint, including a climate message that put conservatives on defense and blunted the usual claims that progressives wanted to gut Australia’s mining economy to save the trees.

    Caroline Spears, the San Francisco-based director of the environmental group Climate Cabinet, said Australia offered lessons for other democracies where right-wing factions reject climate science.

    “We share a lot with Australia, in climate denial and the Murdoch media,” she said, referring to the Australian-born, U.S.-naturalized Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has demonized environmentalism.

    What we do not share with Australia is the architecture of our elections. In Australia, voters are required by law to participate in elections, guaranteeing high turnout. A system of ranked-choice balloting ensures that supporters of independent and minor-party candidates have their votes reallocated if their first preference flops. That makes it a more hospitable environment for teal-style campaigns than the United States, where ballots cast for independent candidates are wasted almost by definition.

    “It’s a much riskier proposition in the States,” said Ed Coper, an Australian strategist deeply involved in the teal campaigns. He said Australia helped show how to punish politicians for “treating climate as a culture-war issue.” But the independent model might be tough to transplant.

    Then there is the matter of campaign finance. Climate 200 spent $13 million in Australia’s elections, to explosive effect. In America that sum would not cover the cost of one pitched Senate race. The social divisions are different, too. Many of the voters who powered Australia’s teal surge were upscale residents of cities and suburbs, left-leaning on cultural and environmental issues but less so on matters of taxes and spending. In the United States, those people are called centrist Democrats.

    In September, Fay’s idea earned a skeptical reception from American environmentalists. The 36-year-old Australian left undeterred; he understood why it might sound far-fetched to people hardened in the brutal machinery of American elections. Several of the Americans wondered if he grasped how rigidly partisan our electoral system is. Besides, they had just won a generational triumph in climate policy through their usual method of supporting Democrats. The need for a wily new approach was not immediately apparent.

    Yet it might be a bad reflex to shrug off a political innovation in an advanced democracy merely because its institutions do not mirror ours.

    When I spoke to Fay recently, he conceded there were enormous structural distinctions between Australian and American politics. Indeed, he joined our Zoom call from a locale that underscored our divergent circumstances: I was at home in America’s frigid capital, while he was under a startling blue sky on the coast of New South Wales. He told me later he went surfing afterward.

    Fay insisted the detailed asymmetries of Australian and American politics should not obscure the big, thematic similarities. The core of the teal model, Fay said, is bringing the climate fight to conservative areas showing some signs of political restlessness. It is a way of testing the loyalty of right-leaning constituencies and giving a new option to voters who care about climate but do not identify as progressives.

    Of course, he said, Democrats would probably have to abandon these races for an independent to have a shot.

    “If you can find two states and 20 House races in which this can work, you change the country,” Fay said. “If I was a Democratic strategist, I would be thinking: Where has potential for us in ten years’ time? And maybe now it could be competitive for an independent.”

    It is a question worth engaging. If the most literal version of the teal strategy is ill-matched to American elections, is there a looser adaptation that could leave a mark?

    Try this one: What if, rather than fielding a set of independents in affluent suburbs with the teal message — a blend of support for climate action, gender equality and clean government — a climate-minded American billionaire funded rural independents with a common platform of unleashing a clean energy revolution, imposing term limits on federal legislators and ending illegal immigration?

    Would unaffiliated candidates with that profile do better or worse than a typical Democrat in a place like Utah or Idaho or Alaska? Who would do more to inflict political pain on an incumbent with reactionary views on climate?

    The McMullin campaign last fall furnished a hint of an answer. The Utah independent lost to Lee by ten percentage points. But that was a leaping improvement on the last challenge to Lee in 2016, when the Republican beat his Democratic opponent by 41 points. In the midterms another political independent, Cara Mund, who ran for Congress in North Dakota on a message anchored in support for abortion rights, lost by a wide margin but did 10 points better than the previous Democratic nominee for the seat. There does seem to be some value in shedding a party label and brandishing a cause that confounds entrenched definitions of left and right.

    That way of doing politics is alien to the United States. But with a consuming issue like the climate crisis, there is no reason to expect the cleverest political solutions will be made in America.

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    #Plan #Blowing #U.S #Climate #Politics
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )