SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday extended a signature state program aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions through 2045, a move Democrats cheered but Republicans warned would raise gas prices.
The program known as cap and trade sets a declining limit on total greenhouse gas emissions in the state from major polluters. Companies must reduce their emissions, buy allowances from the state or other businesses, or fund projects aimed at offsetting their pollution. Money the state receives from the sales funds climate-change mitigation, affordable housing and transportation projects, as well as utility bill credits for Californians.
It was set to expire after 2030. The law Newsom signed Friday at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco potentially boosts carbon-removal projects and requires the program to align with California’s target of achieving so-called carbon neutrality by 2045. That means the state will remove as many carbon emissions as it releases. The law changes the name to “cap and invest” to emphasize that the money goes toward other programs.
“We’re doubling down on our best tool to combat Trump’s assaults on clean air — Cap-and-Invest — by making polluters pay for projects that support our most impacted communities,” Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement.
Newsom also signed a law committing $1 billion in program revenue for the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project, $800 million for an affordable housing program, $250 million for community air protection programs and $1 billion for the Legislature to decide on annually.
He approved other measures aimed at advancing the state’s energy transition and lowering costs for Californians. They include laws to speed up permitting for oil production in Kern County, refill a fund that covers the cost of wildfire damage when utility equipment sparks a blaze and allow the state’s grid operator to partner with a regional group to manage power markets in western states.
Newsom also signed a bill that would increase requirements for air monitoring in areas overburdened by pollution and codify a bureau within the Justice Department created in 2018 to protect communities from environmental injustices.
California has some of the highest utility and gas prices in the country. Officials face increased pressure to stabilize the cost and supply of fuel amid the planned closures of two oil refineries that make up roughly 18% of the state’s refining capacity, according to energy regulators.
Environmental justice advocates said the cap-and-trade extension doesn’t go far enough to address air pollution affecting low-income Californians and communities of color more likely to live near major polluters. The program’s “cap” applies to planet-warming emissions, not other pollutants impacting air quality. Cap and trade doesn’t set emissions limits for individual facilities, meaning an industrial polluter could continue to emit the same amount of greenhouse gases over time so long as it has the right amount of credits or offsets.
Other critics of the cap-and-trade extension are worried about it raising costs. The program has increased gas costs by about 26 cents per gallon, according to a February report from the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, a group of experts that analyzes the program. It has played “a very small role” in increasing electricity prices because the state’s grid isn’t very carbon intensive, the report says.
“I said it in June and I’ll say it again: legislative Democrats live in ‘Bizarro World,’” Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland said in a statement. “Their idea of tackling affordability is extending the Cap-and-Trade program, a hidden tax that drives up costs on everything from gas to groceries. That’s not climate leadership. I call it economic sabotage.”
But Democratic Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, who wrote the reauthorization bill, said it will help the state fight climate change because “the cost of inaction is immeasurable.” She referenced the devastating wildfire that ripped through Pacific Palisades in her district in January.
Daniel Barad, the western states acting co-director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said last week that the extension comes at a key time.
“The most important thing is it extends it to 2045, which was the most critical thing that the state could have done, especially in the face of federal rollbacks and attacks on California’s authority to enforce our lifesaving regulations,” he said.
The approval of a high seas treaty means new protections will be possible in international waters for the first time.
Here’s a rundown of what the treaty is, why it matters and what is still to come.
Formally known as the Agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, the treaty is the first legally binding agreement aimed at protecting marine biodiversity in international waters. These areas, which lie beyond the jurisdiction of any single country, account for nearly two-thirds of the ocean and nearly half of Earth’s surface.
Until now, no comprehensive legal framework existed to create marine protected areas or enforce conservation on the high seas.
Despite their remoteness, the high seas are under growing pressure from overfishing, climate change and the threat of deep-sea mining. Environmental advocates warn that without proper protections, marine ecosystems in international waters face irreversible harm.
“Until now, it has been the wild west on the high seas,” said Megan Randles, global political lead for oceans at Greenpeace. “Now we have a chance to properly put protections in place.”
The treaty is also essential to achieving what’s known as the global “30×30” target — an international pledge to protect 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030.
The treaty creates a legal process for countries to establish marine protected areas in the high seas, including rules for potentially destructive activities like deep-sea mining and geoengineering. It also establishes a framework for technology-sharing, funding mechanisms and scientific collaboration among countries.
Crucially, decisions under the treaty will be made multilaterally through what’s called a conference of the parties rather than by individual countries acting alone.
Ratification Friday by a 60th nation triggered a 120-day countdown before the treaty enters into force. Countries can already begin planning high seas protected areas, but formal proposals will only move forward once oversight mechanisms and decision-making rules are established.
The first conference of the parties must be held within a year of the treaty taking effect. It will lay the groundwork for implementation, including decisions on governance, financing and the creation of key bodies to evaluate marine protection proposals.
Environmental groups are pushing for even more countries to ratify the treaty and to do so quickly — the more countries that ratify, the stronger and more representative the treaty’s implementation will be. There’s a carrot for countries to do so. Only those that ratify by that first conference will be eligible to vote on critical decisions that determine how the treaty will operate.
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Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram
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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
TSOKOMEY, Ghana — Beatrice Nutekpor weaves through the mangroves in Tsokomey community, just outside of Ghana’s capital of Accra, every day to harvest oysters for sale. It’s a family tradition she’s been doing since she was 15. Now 45, she is struggling to sustain the practice and pass it to her daughter.
In Ghana’s coastal mangroves, oyster farming has been a key source of livelihood dominated for ages by women. Hundreds of women were trained in eco-friendly farming methods for oysters, including mangrove planting and preservation, and selective oyster harvesting, to lessen the impact of climate change.
Mangroves, trees or shrubs that grow along coastlines serve a critical multifunctional purpose in the aquatic ecosystem, ranging from being a home to fish to providing a buffer for coastal erosion from rising sea levels, and protection to land during storms and cyclones.
Their efforts to protect the mangroves from encroachment and preserve them for a longer period of up to six months are gradually paying off. “The oysters have started attaching themselves to the mangroves we have planted,” Nutekpor says.
Oyster farming involves breeding oysters in a controlled aquatic environment for commercial purposes.
Much like the rest of coastal West African nations, Ghana has lost a significant portion of its mangroves to climate change and development. There is no available data on recent depletion, but over 80% of the original mangroves have been lost since the last century.
Mangroves are also increasingly threatened by climate change as global temperatures and sea levels rise.
A single basin of oysters sells for roughly 47 Ghanaian cedis ($4), and Nutekpor sells just enough to feed her family and put her daughters through school.
As mangroves are depleted by people in search of firewood, development has crept into the coastal areas and authorities release water from overflowing dams, endangering the forests. Nutekpor’s worst nightmare is already manifesting: This year saw less oysters compared to last year, according to Lydia Sasu, the executive director of the Development Action Association.
For farmers like Nutekpor, the loss of mangroves means risking drowning by free diving 30 feet (9 meters) or deeper for hours, in search of oysters that migrate to deeper water in the absence of mangrove roots.
“When you have a situation where the water body, which is already dynamic, becomes more dynamic than before, the oysters cannot grow,” said Francis Nunoo, a professor of fisheries science at the University of Ghana.
Although replanting the mangroves have paid off for the women, it is a back-breaking job that keeps them in the harsh sun for hours.
For the sake of family, it is worth it, they say.
“We keep doing it for the sake of our children and generations to come,” said Bernice Bebli, 39, another oyster farmer. “The water is our livelihood.”
In a group called the Densu Oyster Pickers Association, they have set out guidelines, including punitive measures for those who cut the mangroves outside of the allowed timeline.
According to Bebli, first-time offenders will lose their oysters, while repeated offenders are reported to the police.
“The reliance of the coastal people on these ecosystems is heavy. … The rate of destruction is always higher than the rate of repopulation, so we are going to lose some species and we are going to lose some lives,” said Nunoo.
For Nutekpor, keeping her family’s heritage is key.
“Just as my mother taught me this business, I also want to teach my daughter so she can teach her child. Then oyster farming will remain our family business,” Nutekpor said.
The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Human-caused climate change drove up risky and unnatural heat for nearly 2 billion people this summer, according to a new report from Climate Central. CBS News national environmental correspondent David Schechter breaks it down.
For years, Pennsylvania communities have been battered by increasingly severe storms and flash flooding — a stark reminder of climate change that swamps our streets, strains our sewers, and threatens our homes.
That is why the Environmental Protection Agency’s new proposal to roll back the “Endangerment Finding” is so dangerously short-sighted. Since 2009, this scientific fact — that greenhouse gases harm our health — has been the bedrock of key clean air protections repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court.
This finding is the essential tool that empowers the EPA to restrict the pollutants driving climate change from transportation and major industries. Weakening it would ignore decades of scientific consensus, putting polluters ahead of the safety of our families, seniors, and communities. The American Lung Association warns this would be a “dangerous setback for health.”
For our state, repealing this finding means more than just dirty air; it means more destructive flooding that overwhelms our aging infrastructure, more unpredictable storms that damage our farms, crops and equipment, and more financial burden on taxpayers to rebuild what should be protected. These climate impacts threaten the very foundations of our commonwealth — from agriculture and business to public health.
The EPA has a responsibility to protect all Americans from these escalating climate threats. I urge every Pennsylvanian to submit a public comment to the EPA before the Sept. 22 deadline, demanding the agency abandon this dangerous effort to weaken the Endangerment Finding and instead prioritize our health and well-being.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here…
Scientists have been studying this bizarre phenomenon since 2014, when a mysterious 165-foot-deep (50-meter-deep) hole suddenly appeared on the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia. Since then, they’ve identified more than a dozen similar craters on the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas and linked their formation to climate change, but key questions remain. Now, a new study could offer some long-awaited answers.
The mystery of Siberia’s sudden holes
Research published Monday in the journal Science of the Total Environment builds on previous work that found that the region’s unique geology—coupled with rising temperatures—can trigger sudden eruptions of methane gas from beneath the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, water seeps down into subsurface pockets of saltwater called cryopegs, kicking off this process.
In the Yamal Peninsula, cryopegs are about 3 feet (1 meter) thick and sit up to 165 feet (50 meters) underground. Below them lies another layer filled with crystallized methane. As meltwater seeps into the cryopegs, pressure builds, creating cracks in the soil that travel up toward the surface. This reverses the pressure gradient, causing a sudden drop in pressure at depth that damages the methane crystals and—BOOM!—triggers an explosive release of methane gas.
Sounds plausible, right? But the findings didn’t explain why the explosions only occur in Siberia, even though the rest of the Arctic is rapidly warming too. In fact, none of the existing models for the craters could answer this question, Helge Hellevang—an environmental geoscientist at the University of Oslo and lead author of the new study—told the New York Times.
Cracking the case: Why Siberia?
To get to the bottom of this, he and his colleagues critically reviewed those existing models. The team concluded that the craters are too large to be explained by ruptures of small gas pockets alone. They constructed their own computer models to gain a more nuanced understanding of their formation, finding that it may be related to faulting in the area.
Gas and heat rising up through the faults from deep underground can become trapped in a sealed cavity beneath the permafrost, their models suggest. As the permafrost melts, that seal weakens. Meanwhile, pressure builds inside the cavity as higher temperatures release gas trapped under the ice. This, combined with highly pressurized gas rising from faults deep below, can make the whole system go kablooey.
Thus, deep heat and gas rising from beneath the permafrost are likely the main cause of these craters, according to Hellevang and his colleagues. Atmospheric heating still plays a role, albeit indirectly. Warming speeds up thawing, weakening the permafrost and helping new lakes and rivers form. This sets the stage for gas and heat to travel through the faults and trigger explosions.
“As atmospheric heating and weakening of the surface permafrost [continue], it is likely that more explosions will occur,” Hellevang told the NYT. He said he would like to observe how these gas craters transform into lakes over time to see if they come to resemble other lakes in the region. This could help explain the origin of some of the many round lakes that dapple Siberia’s landscape.
Nearly 200 shipping companies said Monday they want the world’s largest maritime nations to adopt regulations that include the first-ever global fee on greenhouse gases to reduce their sector’s emissions.
The Getting to Zero Coalition, an alliance of companies, governments and intergovernmental organizations, is asking member states of the International Maritime Organization to support adopting regulations to transition to green shipping, including the fee, when they meet in London next month. The statement was shared exclusively with The Associated Press in advance.
“Given the significance of the political decision being made, we think it is important that industry voices in favor of this adoption be heard,” Jesse Fahnestock, who leads decarbonization work at the Global Maritime Forum, said Monday. The forum manages the Getting to Zero Coalition.
The Trump administration unequivocally rejects the proposal before the IMO and has threatened to retaliate if nations support it, setting the stage for a fight over the major climate deal. The U.S. considers the proposed regulatory framework “effectively a global carbon tax on Americans levied by an unaccountable U.N. organization,” the U.S. Secretaries of State, Commerce, Energy and Transportation said in a joint statement last month.
U.S.-based shipping companies, however, have endorsed it. The Chamber of Shipping of America wants one global system, not multiple regional systems that could double charge vessels for their emissions depending on the route, said Kathy Metcalf, the chamber’s president emeritus.
Shipping emissions have grown over the last decade to about 3% of the global total as vessels have gotten bigger, delivering more cargo per trip and using immense amounts of fossil fuels. The IMO, which regulates international shipping, set a target for the sector to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by about 2050, and has committed to ensuring that fuels with zero or near-zero emissions are used more widely.
In April, IMO member states agreed on the contents of a regulatory framework to impose a minimum fee for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above certain thresholds and set a marine fuel standard to phase in cleaner fuels. The IMO aims for consensus in decision-making but, in this case, had to vote. The United States was notably absent.
Now nations have to decide if the regulations will enter into force in 2027. If agreed upon, the regulations will become mandatory for large oceangoing ships over 5,000 gross tonnage, which emit 85% of the total carbon emissions from international shipping, according to the IMO.
If nations don’t agree, shipping’s decarbonization will be further delayed and “the chance of the sector playing a proper and fair part in the fight to keep global heating below dangerous levels will almost certainly be lost,” said Delaine McCullough, president of the Clean Shipping Coalition and Ocean Conservancy shipping program director.
The U.S. secretaries said in their statement that “fellow IMO members should be on notice” the U.S. will “not hesitate to retaliate or explore remedies for our citizens” if they do not support the United States, against this action. They said ships will have to pay fees for failing to meet “unattainable fuel standards and emissions targets,” driving up costs, and the fuel standards would “conveniently benefit China.” China is a leader in developing and producing cleaner fuels for shipping.
While U.S. opposition and pressure cannot be taken for granted, it still appears as though a majority of countries currently support the regulations, said Faig Abbasov from Transport and Environment, a Brussels-based environmental nongovernmental organization. Abbasov said the deal reached in April was not ambitious enough, but this is an opportunity to launch the sector’s decarbonization and it can be strengthened.
Shipping companies want the regulations because it gives them the certainty needed to confidently make investments in cleaner technologies, such as fuels that are alternatives to fossil fuels and the ships that run on them. In addition to the Getting to Zero Coalition, the International Chamber of Shipping, which represents over 80% of the world’s merchant fleet, is advocating for adoption when nations meet at IMO Headquarters in London from Oct. 14 to 17.
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AP Writer Sibi Arasu contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will extend a key climate program under a bill state lawmakers passed Saturday, sending the measure to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has championed it as a crucial tool to respond to the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.
The Democrat-dominated Legislature voted to reauthorize the state’s cap-and-trade program, which is set to expire after 2030. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, signed a law authorizing the program in 2006, and it launched in 2013.
The program sets a declining limit on total planet-warming emissions in the state from major polluters. Companies must reduce their emissions, buy allowances from the state or other businesses, or fund projects aimed at offsetting their emissions. Money the state receives from the sales funds climate-change mitigation, affordable housing and transportation projects, as well as utility bill credits for Californians.
Newsom, a Democrat, and legislative leaders, who said months ago they would prioritize reauthorizing the program, almost ran out of time to introduce the proposal before the statehouse wraps for the year.
“After months of hard work with the Legislature, we have agreed to historic reforms that will save money on your electric bills, stabilize gas supply, and slash toxic air pollution — all while fast-tracking California’s transition to a clean, green job-creating economy,” Newsom said after striking the deal this week.
The proposal would reauthorize the program through 2045, better align the declining cap on emissions with the state’s climate targets and potentially boost carbon-removal projects. It would also change the name to “cap and invest” to emphasize its funding of climate programs.
The Legislature approved another bill committing annual funding from the program’s revenues. It includes $1 billion for the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project, $800 million for an affordable housing program, $250 million for community air protection programs and $1 billion for the Legislature to decide on annually.
The votes come as officials contend with balancing the state’s ambitious climate goals and the cost of living. California has some of the highest utility and gas prices in the country. Officials face increased pressure to stabilize the cost and supply of fuel amid the planned closures of two oil refineries that make up roughly 18% of the state’s refining capacity, according to energy regulators.
Proponents of the extension say it will give companies certainty over the program’s future. The state lost out on $3.6 billion in revenues over the past year and a half, largely due to uncertainty, according to a report from Clean and Prosperous California, a group of economists and lawyers supporting the program. Some environmentalists say the Trump administration’s attacks on climate programs, including the state’s first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, added urgency to the reauthorization effort.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said the extension balanced the state’s ambitious emission-reduction and affordability goals. The Democrat called cap and trade “the cornerstone of our climate strategy.”
But environmental justice advocates opposing the proposal say it doesn’t go far enough and lacks strong air quality protections for low-income Californians and communities of color more likely to live near major polluters.
“This really continues to allow big oil to reduce their emissions on paper instead of in real life,” said Asha Sharma, state policy manager at the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.
GOP lawmakers criticized the program, saying it would make living in California more expensive.
“Cap and trade has become cap and tax,” said James Gallagher, the Assembly Republican minority leader. “It’s going to raise everybody’s costs.”
Cap and trade has increased gas costs by about 26 cents per gallon, according to a February report from the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, a group of experts that analyzes the program. It has played “a very small role” in increasing electricity prices because the state’s grid isn’t very carbon intensive, the report says.
Lawmakers and lobbyists criticized the governor and legislative leaders for rushing the deal through with little public input.
Ben Golombek, executive vice president of the California Chamber of Commerce, said at a hearing this week that the Legislature should have taken more time “to do this right.”
Democratic state Sen. Caroline Menjivar said it shouldn’t be par for the course for lawmakers to jam through bills without the opportunity for amendments.
“We’re expected to vote on it,” she said of Democrats. “If not, you’re seen to not be part of the team or not want to be a team player.”
Menjivar ultimately voted to advance the bill out of committee.
The cap-and-trade bills are part of a sweeping package lawmakers approved aimed at advancing the state’s energy transition and lowering costs for Californians.
One of the bills would speed up permitting for oil production in Kern County, which proponents have hailed as a necessary response to planned refinery closures and critics have blasted as a threat to air quality.
Another bill would increase requirements for air monitoring in areas overburdened by pollution and codify a bureau within the Justice Department created in 2018 to protect communities from environmental injustices.
The Legislature voted to refill a fund that covers the cost of wildfire damage when utility equipment sparks a blaze. The bill would set up public financing to build electric utility projects.
Lawmakers also passed a measure allowing the state’s grid operator to partner with a regional group to manage power markets in western states. The bill aims to improve grid reliability. It would save ratepayers money because California would sell power to other states when it generates more than it needs and buy cheaper energy from out of state when necessary, the governor’s office said.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and H&M are currently investing in durable CDR. A spokesperson for H&M described the fast-fashion company’s purchase of 10,000 metric tons of durable CDR from the Swiss company Climeworks, one of the largest purchases to date, and said H&M plans to use them to neutralize residual emissions. The tech companies affirmed their commitment to reduce emissions first and then use carbon removal to offset residual emissions, though none of them addressed NewClimate Institute’s concerns that they would use large amounts of durable and nondurable CDR to claim progress toward net-zero.
A statement provided to Grist from TotalEnergies did not address CDR. It instead described the company’s support for carbon capture and storage and “nature-based solutions.” The latter refers to short-lived offsets, such as tree-planting, that the NewClimate Institute does not believe are appropriate for offsetting fossil fuel emissions.
Apple, Duke Energy, and Shein declined to comment after seeing the report. The remaining 24 companies did not respond to inquiries from Grist.
Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan and the dean of its School for Environment and Sustainability, said the NewClimate Institute report is timely. “Right now the whole idea of CDR … is kind of a Wild West scene, with lots of actors promising to do things that may or may not be possible,” he said. He added that companies appear to be using CDR as an alternative to mitigating their climate pollution.
“The priority has to be on reducing emissions, not on durable CDR at this point,” he told Grist.
In the near term, durable CDR is doing virtually nothing to offset emissions. As of 2023, only 0.0023 gigatons of CO2 were removed from the atmosphere each year using these methods. That’s about 15,000 times less than the annual amount of climate pollution from fossil fuels and cement manufacturing.
According to the NewClimate Institute, voluntary initiatives are no substitute for government-mandated emissions reduction targets and investments in durable CDR. To the extent that these initiatives exist, however, the organization says they should provide a clearer definition of what constitutes “durable” carbon removal; determine companies’ responsibility for scaling up durable CDR based on their ongoing and historical emissions, or—perhaps more realistically—on their ability to pay; and require companies to set separate targets for emissions reductions and support for durable CDR. The last recommendation is intended to reinforce a climate action hierarchy that puts mitigation before offsetting. Companies should not “hide inaction on decarbonization behind investments in removals,” as the report puts it.
Mooldijk said voluntary initiatives can incentivize investments in durable CDR by recognizing “climate contributions.” These might manifest as simple statements about companies’ monetary contributions to durable CDR, instead of claims about the amount of CO2 that they have theoretically neutralized.
Some of these recommendations were submitted earlier this year to the Science-Based Targets initiative, the world’s most respected verifier of private sector climate targets. The organization is getting ready to update its corporate net-zero standard with new guidance on the use of CDR. Another standard-setter, the International Organization for Standardization, is similarly preparing to release new standards on net-zero, which could curtail some of the most questionable corporate climate claims while also drumming up support for durable CDR.
John Reilly, a senior lecturer emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said that ultimately, proper regulation of corporate climate commitments—including of durable CDR—will fall on governments. Companies “are happy to throw a little money into these things,” he said, “but I don’t think voluntary guidelines are ever going to get you there.”
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The fate of a key California climate program Gov. Gavin Newsom has championed as a crucial tool to respond to the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks is in the hands of state lawmakers.
The Democrat-dominated Legislature is slated to vote Saturday on whether to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program, which is set to expire after 2030. The program, which launched in 2013, allows major greenhouse gas emitters to buy emission allowances from the state, with fewer available over time. Revenues fund climate change mitigation, affordable housing and transportation projects, as well as utility bill credits for Californians.
Newsom, a Democrat, and legislative leaders, who said months ago they would prioritize reauthorizing the program, almost ran out of time to introduce the proposal before the statehouse wraps for the year.
“After months of hard work with the Legislature, we have agreed to historic reforms that will save money on your electric bills, stabilize gas supply, and slash toxic air pollution — all while fast-tracking California’s transition to a clean, green job-creating economy,” Newsom said after striking the deal this week.
The proposal would reauthorize the program through 2045, better align the declining cap on emissions with the state’s climate targets and potentially boost carbon removal projects. It would also change the name to “cap and invest” to emphasize its funding of climate programs.
The Legislature will vote on another bill committing annual funding from the program’s revenues. It includes $1 billion for the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project, $800 million for an affordable housing program, $250 million for community air protection programs and $1 billion for the Legislature to decide on annually.
The votes come as officials contend with balancing the state’s ambitious climate goals and the cost of living. California has some of the highest utility and gas prices in the country. Officials face increased pressure to stabilize the cost and supply of fuel amid the planned closures of two oil refineries that make up roughly 18% of the state’s refining capacity, according to energy regulators.
Proponents of the extension say it will give companies certainty over the program’s future. The state lost out on $3.6 billion in revenues over the past year and a half, largely due to uncertainty, according to a report from Clean and Prosperous California, a group of economists and lawyers supporting the program. Some environmentalists say the Trump administration’s attacks on climate programs, including the state’s first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, added urgency to the reauthorization effort.
Cap and trade is an important cost-effective tool for curbing carbon emissions, said Katelyn Roedner Sutter, the California state director for the Environmental Defense Fund.
“Supporting this program and making this commitment into the future is extremely important — now more than ever,” she said.
But environmental justice advocates opposing the proposal say it doesn’t go far enough and lacks strong air quality protections for low-income Californians and communities of color more likely to live near major polluters.
“This really continues to allow big oil to reduce their emissions on paper instead of in real life,” said Asha Sharma, state policy manager at the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability.
Critics have also said it will increase the cost of living.
“This moving forward, instead of lowering costs, it makes California even more expensive,” Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland said. “They’re raising the price of energy and gas and goods and services.”
Cap and trade has increased gas costs by about 26 cents per gallon, according to a February report from the Independent Emissions Advisory Committee, a group of experts that analyzes the program. It’s played “a very small role” in increasing electricity prices because the state’s grid isn’t very carbon intensive, the report says.
Lawmakers and lobbyists criticized the governor and legislative leaders for rushing the deal through with little public input.
Ben Golombek, executive vice president of the California Chamber of Commerce, said at a hearing this week that the Legislature should have taken more time “to do this right.”
Democratic state Sen. Caroline Menjivar said it shouldn’t be par for the course for lawmakers to jam through bills without the opportunity for amendments.
“We’re expected to vote on it,” she said of Democrats. “If not, you’re seen to not be part of the team or not want to be a team player.”
Menjivar ultimately voted to advance the bill out of committee.
The cap-and-trade bills are part of a sweeping package aimed at advancing the state’s energy transition and lowering costs for Californians.
One of the bills would streamline permits for oil production in Kern County, which proponents have hailed as a necessary response to planned refinery closures and critics have blasted as a threat to air quality.
Another would increase requirements for air monitoring in areas overburdened by pollution and codify a bureau within the Justice Department created in 2018 to protect communities from environmental injustices.
The state could refill a fund that covers the cost of wildfire damage caused by utility companies and set up public financing to build electric utility projects.
Lawmakers will also vote on a measure allowing the state’s grid operator to partner with a regional group to manage power markets in western states. The bill aims to improve grid reliability. It would save ratepayers money because California would sell power to other states when it generates more than it needs and buy cheaper energy from out of state when necessary, the governor’s office said.
LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. — When sculptor Bobby Zokaites moved to Phoenix in the summer of 2011, walking the half mile to classes at Arizona State University in triple-digit heat felt risky. He learned to find shade along his route — resting in a stoplight’s sliver of it, dodging the sizzling sun at each opportunity.
“It was pretty crazy,” he recalled.
Those experiences influenced one of Zokaites’ latest projects: He was one of nine artists commissioned this year to bring shade to the region.
Across the U.S., cities are weaving art, science and community engagement to protect people from extreme heat and communicate its risks. As cities adapt to hotter temperatures, driven by human-caused climate change, and contend with urban heat, shade is playing a critical role. But communicating heat risks and safety can be challenging. That is where art comes in. It can engage, bring hope and even enhance how cool someone feels.
Shade “can be much more than functional,” said David Hondula, Phoenix’s director of heat response and mitigation. “It can enrich our public spaces.”
At one park in Phoenix, a large awning is held up with panels of dazzling colors. On them are painted whimsical creatures called “alebrijes” from Mexican folk art, and the structure contains a solar-powered misting system. At another park, a canopy decorated with colorful drawings uses reflective paint and an ultraviolet-resistant canvas.
These are part of Phoenix’s temporary public art pieces created with help from locals. Each was unveiled during a community event featuring information about shade and heat safety, along with free cooling towels and sunscreen.
“The more you know and the more you can recognize your own body’s response, the better you can take care of yourself,” said Carrie Brown, deputy director for the city’s office of art and culture.
These art installations are one element of the city’s plan to expand shade. Studies show that shade significantly reduces air and surface temperature and how intensely people feel heat. In a city that has averaged in the last decade more than 115 days annually with day temperatures past 100 F (38 C), cooling shade can be lifesaving.
Shade can feel even cooler when combined with beauty. One study in Phoenix, co-authored by Hondula, found that people rated aesthetically pleasing bus stops as being cooler than less beautiful ones. In another from Hong Kong, findings suggested that people had a higher heat tolerance when they perceived their environment as quiet and beautiful.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place accustomed to dreary winters but not heat, a project titled “ Shade is Social Justice ” is helping the city convey heat dangers and safety with creative designs. One installation features hanging flowers that open when temperatures hit 85 F (29 C), signaling to people to cool down with water and shade, said Claudia Zarazua, the city’s art and cultural planning director.
On a recent afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona State University doctoral student Muhammad Abdullah rolled an advanced mobile weather station called MaRTy 3D+ next to a shade art installation in Cielito Park. He measured temperature, humidity, wind and radiation, then estimated what could be happening to a person’s body in both the shade and in direct sun light.
He found that moving from sun to shade dropped the mean radiant temperature from about 145 F (63 C) to 88 F (about 31 C). The change did not significantly affect core temperature, but skin temperature decreased immediately. When MaRTy3D+ returned to the sun, skin temperature rose again.
MaRTy 3D+’s ability to model and measure how different people thermoregulate is unique. It can tell researchers, for instance, the skin and core temperature as well as cardiac strain in someone who is elderly or on a specific medication, said Jennifer Vanos, an associate professor at ASU who studies heat’s impacts on the human body and how to mitigate them. This technology allows them to collect real-time data in sometimes risky situations without impacting humans. They are using their findings to make recommendations to the city.
Edith de Guzman, a cooperative extension researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has spent years researching how to increase shade in communities most impacted by heat. With colleagues, she has also quantified that shade can reduce up to 25% of heat-related deaths in LA and up to 66% of heat-related emergency room visits. When the opportunity emerged to curate an art exhibit about shade and who lacks access to it, she and her husband took it.
“Roots of Cool: A Celebration of Trees and Shade in a Warming World” takes visitors into the past, present and future roles of shade in LA with textiles, paintings, mixed media, interactive maps, suspended multicolored umbrellas and more. Their goal is not just to highlight the issue, but also show the general public that solutions exist, de Guzman said.
A three-part installation by artist Leslie K. Gray invites visitors to consider the past, current and future experiences of public transportation users in the city. Each features a silhouetted woman waiting at a bus stop with either no shade, a little bit or ample amounts. The bus stop signs include facts about the dangers of heat, the benefits of shade and the disparate access to it.
The exhibit ends in a room with hundreds of postcards with handwritten messages from visitors to the past, present or future. On the other side are drawings showing how they would bring much-needed shade to a bus stop.
Behind one card dated Sept. 1, a visitor wrote this message: “Dear people from the past. Take care of others among you. Take care of mother earth or we will be at fault for its destruction and ours. Sincerely — Someone (who’s) watching the effects of our actions occur.”
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Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.
Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.
The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said.
But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA. When schools and other tax-exempt organizations receive these credits, they come in the form of a direct cash reimbursement.
At the same time, Tucson and thousands of districts across the country that were planning to develop solar and wind power projects are now forced to decide between accelerating them to try to meet HR1’s fast-approaching “commence construction” deadline of June 2026, finding other sources of funding or hitting pause on their plans. Tina Cook, energy project manager for Tucson schools, said the district might have to scale back some of its projects unless it could find local sources of funding.
“Phasing out the tax credits for wind and solar energy is going to make a huge, huge difference,” said Doshi, 18, now a first-year college student. “It ends a lot of investments in poor and minority communities. You really get rid of any notion of environmental justice that the IRA had advanced.”
Emma Weber leads a chant at a Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
The tax credits in the IRA, the largest legislative investment in climate projects in U.S. history, had marked a major opportunity for schools and colleges to reduce their impact on the environment. Educational institutions are significant contributors to climate change: K-12 school infrastructure, for example, releases at least 41 million metric tons of emissions per year, according to a paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The K-12 school system’s buses — some 480,000 — and meals also produce significant emissions and waste. Clean energy projects supported by the IRA were helping schools not only to limit their climate toll but also to save money on energy costs over the long term and improve student health, advocates said.
As a result, many students, consultants and sustainability leaders said, they have no plans to abandon clean energy projects. They said they want to keep working to cut emissions, even though that may be more difficult now.
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Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, which helps school districts green their operations, divided HR1’s fallout on schools into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.
On the bright side, she said, schools can still get up to 50 percent off for installing ground source heat pumps — those credits will continue — to more efficiently heat schools. The network of pipes in a ground source pump cycles heat from the shallow earth into buildings.
In the “bad” category, any electric vehicle acquired after Sept. 30 of this year will not be eligible for tax credits — drastically accelerating the IRA’s phase-out timeline by seven years. That applies to electric school buses as well as electric vehicle charging stations at schools. EPA’s Clean School Bus Program still exists for two more years and covers two-thirds of the funding for all electric school buses districts acquire in that time. The remaining one-third, however, was to be covered by federal and state tax credits.
The expiration of the federal tax credits could cost a district up to $40,000 more per vehicle, estimated Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative run by the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
Solar projects will see the most “ugly” effects of HR1, Ross said.
Los Angeles Unified School District is planning to build 21 solar projects on roofs, carports and other structures, plus 13 electric vehicle charging sites, as part of an effort to reduce energy costs and achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. The district anticipated receiving around $25 million in federal tax credits to help pay for the $90 million contract, said Christos Chrysiliou, chief eco-sustainability officer for the district. With the tight deadlines imposed by HR1, the district can no longer count on receiving that money.
“It’s disappointing,” Chrysiliou said. “It’s nice to be able to have that funding in place to meet the goals and objectives that we have.”
Emma Weber, at left, trains student leaders at Sunrise Movement’s “summer intensive” in Illinois this year. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
LAUSD is looking at a small portion of a $9 billion bond measure passed last year, as well as utility rebates, third-party financing and grants from the California Energy Commission, to help make up for some of the gaps in funding.
Many California State University campuses are in a similar position as they work to install solar to meet the system’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, said Lindsey Rowell, CSU’s chief energy, sustainability and transportation officer.
Tariffs on solar panel materials from overseas and the early sunsetting of tax credits mean that “the cost of these projects are becoming prohibitive for campuses,” Rowell said.
Sweeps of undocumented immigrants in California may also lead to labor shortages that could slow the pace of construction, Rowell added. “Limiting the labor force in any way is only going to result in an increased cost, so those changes are frightening as well,” she said.
New Treasury Department guidance, issued Aug. 15, made it much harder for projects to meet the threshold needed to qualify for the tax credits. Renewable energy projects previously qualified for credits once a developer spent 5 percent of a project’s cost. But the guidelines have been tightened — now, larger projects must pass a “physical work test,” meaning “significant physical labor has begun on a site,” before they can qualify for credits. With the construction commencement deadline looming next June, these will likely leave many projects ineligible for credits.
“The rules are new, complex [and] not widely understood,” Ross said. “We’re really concerned about schools’ ability to continue to do solar projects and be able to effectively navigate these new rules.”
Schools without “fancy legal teams” may struggle to understand how the new tax credit changes in HR1 will affect their finances and future projects, she added.
Some universities were just starting to understand how the IRA tax credits could help them fund projects. Lily Strehlow, campus sustainability coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, said the planning cycle for clean energy projects at the school can take ten years. The university is in the process of adding solar to the roof of a large science building, and depending on the date of completion, the project “might or might not” qualify for the credits, she said.
“At this point, everybody’s holding their breath,” said Rick Brown, founder of California-based TerraVerde Energy, a clean energy consultant to schools and agencies.
Brown said that none of his company’s projects are in a position where they’re not going to get done, but the company may end up seeing fewer new projects due to a higher cost of equipment.
Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, which supports climate work in education, added that colleges and universities are in a broader period of uncertainty, due to larger attacks from the Trump administration, and are not likely to make additional investments at this time: “We’re definitely in a wait and see.”
For youth activists, the fallout from HR1 is “disheartening,” Doshi said.
Emma and Molly Weber, climate activists since eighth grade, said they are frustrated. The Colorado-based twins, who will start college this fall, helped secure the first “Green New Deal for Schools” resolution in the nation in the Boulder Valley School District. Its goals include working toward a goal of Zero Net Energy by 2050, making school buildings greener, creating pathways to green jobs and expanding climate change education.
Emma, far left, and Molly Weber, far right, work with climate leaders from the Boulder Valley School District’s Sunrise Movement to prepare for Colorado’s legislative session. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
“It feels very demoralizing to see something you’ve been working so hard at get slashed back, especially since I’ve spoken to so many students from all over the country about these clean energy tax credits, being like, ‘These are the things that are available to you, and this is how you can help convince your school board to work on this,’” Emma Weber said.
The Webers started thinking about other creative ways to pay for the clean energy transition and have settled on advocating for state-level legislation in the form of a climate superfund, where major polluters in a community would be responsible for contributing dollars to sustainability initiatives.
Consultants and sustainability coordinators said that they don’t see the demand for renewable energy going away. “Solar is the cheapest form of energy. It makes sense to put it on every rooftop that we can. And that’s true with or without tax credits,” Strehlow said.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
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Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday.
Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.
Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.
“It just shows that it’s not that many actors … who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study’s contributors.
The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren’t suitable for their analysis.
Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found. Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialization began accelerating in the 1800s. The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves “would have been virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.
“Many of these heat waves had very strong consequences,” said Seneviratne. She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences.
Climate scientists can use complex computer programs and historic weather data to calculate the connection between extreme weather events and the planet-warming pollutants humans emit. Climate change attribution studies often focus on how climate change influenced a specific weather event, but the scientists say this new Nature study is unique because it focused on the extent to which cement and fossil fuel producers have contributed to heat waves.
“They are drawing on a pretty well-established field of attribution science now, which has existed for about 20 years,” said Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. Callahan has used similar attribution methodologies in his research and said the new study is appropriate and high-quality.
Scientists say the new study could be taken into consideration in legal cases. Globally, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies by climate activists, American state governments and others seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in climate change.
For example, Vermont and New York have passed laws that aim to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and the damage caused.
“For a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that’s not true,” said Callahan.
Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings provide insight into the origins of the heat waves and how potential hazards from them could be minimized in the future.
“As we contend with these losses, the assessment of who or what’s responsible is going to become really important,” Mankin said. “I think there are some really appropriate questions, like who pays to recoup our losses, given that we’re all being damaged by it.”
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — African leaders met Monday in the Ethiopian capital for the second Africa Climate Summit, where they proposed a new way of thinking about climate adaptation funding and called for the continent to be viewed not as a victim, but as an investment opportunity.
With a population of more than one billion, African countries have been hit hardest by climate disasters such as droughts and floods, which have made millions of people vulnerable. In 2023, at the inaugural summit in Kenya, African leaders made ambitious plans to increase renewable energy, but funding constraints have slowed implementation.
This year’s summit aims to unlock climate financing and accelerate Africa-led solutions and adaptation.
It is “time to replace climate aid with climate investment,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said during the summit’s opening ceremony, which was attended by heads of state from African nations as well as business leaders, climate scientists, activists and other stakeholders.
Amos Wemanya, a climate action campaigner with Greenpeace Africa, said the climate adaptation funding gap can be met by taxing polluters.
“We need to tax the polluters and the super-rich to generate the resources needed to make them pay for the climate plunder they are causing the continent,” he said.
Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, the chairperson of the African Union — a continental body of 55 member states and a co-host of the summit — proposed a framework of “climate justice” to help vulnerable countries grappling with the dual challenges of climate change and debt.
The summit declaration, which will outline Africa’s priorities and proposed solutions, is expected to be finalized this week, during the three-day gathering. It will then be presented at COP30 in November. COP30 president, Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, attended the Africa summit and expressed his solidarity.
Ethiopia, the host of this year’s summit, will inaugurate the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project along the Blue Nile on Tuesday. It is expected to produce more than 5,000 megawatts, doubling Ethiopia’s current output, part of which will be exported to neighboring countries.
In July, the country launched a national campaign to plant 700 million trees in one day as part of an ambitious conservation initiative that aims to plant 50 billion trees by 2026.
WASHINGTON — Global warming in the United States is amping up the country’s sweet tooth, a new study found.
When the temperature rises, Americans — especially those with less money and education — drink lots more sugary beverages and a bit more frozen desserts. That amounts to more than 100 million pounds of added sugar (358 million kilograms) consumed in the nation a year, compared to 15 years earlier, according to a team of researchers in the U.S. and United Kingdom.
When temperatures go between 54 and 86 degrees (12 and 30 degrees Celsius), the amount of sugar the average American consumes goes up by about 0.4 grams per degree Fahrenheit (0.7 grams per degree Celsius) per day, based on researchers tracking of weather conditions and consumers’ purchases. At 54 degrees, the amount of added sugar for the average American is a little more than 2 grams. At 86 degrees, it’s more than 15 grams.
Beyond that, appetites lessen and added sugar falls off, according to the study in Monday’s Nature Climate Change.
“Climate change is shaping what you eat and how you eat and that might have a bad effect on your health,” said study co-author Duo Chan, a climate scientist at the University of Southampton.
“People tend to take in more sweetened beverages as the temperature is getting higher and higher,” Chan said. “Obviously under a warming climate that would cause you to drink more or take in more sugar. And that is going to be a severe problem when it comes to health.”
The daily difference from higher temperatures doesn’t amount to even a single candy bar for the average person. But it adds up over time and has a big effect, said University of California San Francisco endocrinology professor Dr. Robert Lustig, a specialist in pediatrics and obesity who wasn’t part of the study.
Lustig wrote in an email that among poorer Americans, just one added can of sugary soft drink per day increases diabetes risk by 29% — and temperature-related thirst plays a big part in America’s obesity epidemic.
The United States’ average annual temperature has gone up about 2.2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
To chart the impact on sugar consumption, researchers compared it to the American Heart Association recommendations: limiting daily intake to 36 grams for men and 25 grams for women.
The team then compared wind, precipitation and humidity records to the detailed purchase records of 40,000 to 60,000 American households from 2004 to 2019, not using any data after the pandemic hit. Then they looked at the nutritional information of the items bought. That allowed them to eliminate other factors to make a causal link and come up with a calculation for how much extra sugar is consumed per person per degree, said lead author Pan He, an environmental scientist at Cardiff University.
Researcher He said she started thinking about the study when she noticed that people in the U.S. tend to grab sugary soda when they are thirsty: “From a perspective of nutrition science or environmental science, that could be a problem,” she said.
The researchers found that men consumed more sugary soft drinks, and that the amount of added sugar consumed during hot weather was several times higher for low- and very low-income families than for the wealthiest, the study found.
People who work outside drank more sugary drinks than those who work inside, and the same went for families where the head of the household was less educated. White people have the highest added sugar effect, while Asians showed no significant change in added sugar in the heat.
Lustig said sugary drinks are marketed and priced in a way to attract the poor, and in many disadvantaged communities the water tastes funny because of chemicals in them. Poor people are also less likely to have air conditioning and are more likely to work outside and need more hydration, Lustig and He said.
“It should concern us that the rate of the impact is larger in households where people make less money or are less educated,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. “These groups tend to have lower baseline health status, so this is an area where climate-related changes appear to magnify existing health inequalities.”
Howard, an emergency room physician, was not part of the study.
The amount of sugar consumed is likely to soar in the future with more warming, Chan said.
But University of Washington health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi, who wasn’t part of the research, said as temperatures increase with human-caused climate change “there will be other issues of more importance than a small increase in sugary beverages.”
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
LOS ANGELES — On a recent sunny morning in a channel at the Port of Los Angeles, seven blue steel structures that look like small boats are lowered into the ocean one by one. Attached to an unused wharf on a site that once housed oil tanks, they gently bob up and down with the waves to generate renewable power. Nearby, a sea lion peeks from the water and pelicans and sea gulls soar overhead.
This is the nation’s first onshore wave energy site, and on Tuesday, Eco Wave Power will officially unveil the pilot installation and begin operating. The pilot will generate just a small amount of electricity that can be used locally, but the larger goal is to prove the technology works well enough to expand along 8 miles of breakwater at the port — enough to power up to 60,000 homes.
Co-founder and CEO Inna Braverman said that much power could be a “game changer in terms of clean energy production” for the port and the communities around it. America’s shipping ports have long struggled with dirty air that harms the health of people living nearby.
“We’re starting here in LA, but we hope, aspire and believe that we will be in the United States and in other locations around the world,” she said, standing outside a blue shipping container serving as the project’s power station.
Wave energy is an emerging industry that’s largely still focused on research, demonstration and pilot projects. But the potential is big.
Waves off the coasts of the United States generate enough power to meet roughly one-third of America’s energy needs, according to Department of Energy estimates. Even if only a portion is harnessed, wave energy technologies could help meet the growing demand for electricity being driven in large part by the artificial intelligence race. Wave energy could also complement wind and solar to stabilize the electric grid.
Eco Wave Power installed its technology at the port’s AltaSea ocean institute, a nonprofit that is working in part to advance ocean-based solutions to climate change. Half this pilot project was funded by the oil and gas company Shell.
“It’s the first U.S. project on breakwater, so it opens up the possibility to do that on multiple other ports in the U.S.,” said Rémi Gruet, CEO of the trade association Ocean Energy Europe. “It’s a moment where wave power is starting to turn from innovation projects to actual pilot projects that go toward industrialization and commercialization.”
A key advantage for wave energy is it produces electricity at different times than wind and solar, Gruet said. For example, when the wind stops blowing, wind turbines will stop generating electricity. But waves will carry on for hours and electricity can still be generated that way, he said.
But the cost needs to come down with the help of subsidies, like it has for solar and wind, Gruet added.
The first commercial wave power plant in Europe started operating in 2011 from a breakwater at Mutriku harbor in Spain. An offshore wave energy system came online off the coast of Hawaii in 2016.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in 2023 to promote wave energy development in the state. Eco Wave Power currently has a two-year license to operate the pilot station at the Port of Los Angeles.
As the small blue floats bob up and down, each pushes a cylinder that sends a biodegradable hydraulic fluid through a system of pipes into storage tanks. Pressure in the tanks builds up. That pressure turns a motor, which turns a generator, producing clean electricity.
“The world has waves, 70% percent of the world is covered by ocean,” Terry Tamminen, president and CEO of AltaSea and former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said at the site of the project.
“And we can harness all of that clean energy now, thanks to things like Eco Wave,” he said.
Braverman said there are dozens of sites along the U.S. coastline, identified through a study paid for by Shell, where her company could harness wave energy to add clean electricity to the grid. She said the technology is easy to adopt because unlike other renewables, this system doesn’t require any land acquisition, it involves repurposing existing structures rather than altering coastlines and it can generate electricity around the clock.
The Eco Wave pilot did require licensing from the Army Corps of Engineers and from the port, but that came in a relatively quick two years, Braverman said.
Eco Wave Power is also working on projects abroad, including Taiwan, India and Portugal, and operating a grid-connected project in Israel. In New Jersey, where legislation is advancing to promote ocean energy development in the state, the company is looking for a site to install a pilot project, with help from elected officials.
Andrea Copping, an expert in marine renewable energy development, thinks Eco Wave Power’s technology can be scaled up successfully. These small marine energy projects are not yet economically competitive with solar or wind, but there are places where they may be a better fit or a solution in cooperation with other energy sources, such as remote coastal communities and islands where diesel deliveries can be very expensive, she said.
“We consider every successful deployment an important milestone in creating this industry,” said Copping, a distinguished faculty fellow in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington.
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McDermott reported from Providence, R.I.
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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. AP’s climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
“In the old days, it was more like a luxury project,” says Deo de Klerk, team lead for heating and cooling solutions at the Dutch energy firm Eneco. Today, his company’s clients increasingly ask for district cooling as well as district heating systems. Eneco has 33 heating and cooling projects under construction. In Rotterdam, Netherlands, one of the company’s installations helps to cool buildings, including apartment blocks, police offices, a theater and restaurants, using water from the River Meuse.
It’s not hard to see why cooling technologies are getting more popular. A few years ago, Nayral moved out of Paris. She remembers the heat waves. “My routine during the weekend was to go to the parks,” she says. Nayral would sit there well into the evening—reading Les Misérables, no less—waiting for her apartment to cool down. Recently, she has increasingly found herself spending time in shopping malls, where air-conditioning is plentiful, in order to make it through searing hot French summers. This year, unprecedented heat waves hit France and other countries in Europe.
The city of Paris is now desperate to help its denizens find cool refuges during spells of extreme heat. A key component of Parisian climate adaptation plans is the river-supplied cooling network, the pipes for which currently cover a distance of 100 kilometers, though this is due to expand to 245 km by 2042. While around 800 buildings are served by the network today, those in charge aim to supply 3,000 buildings by that future date.
Systems such as Paris’ do not pump river water around properties. Rather, a loop of pipework brings river water into facilities where it soaks up warmth from a separate, closed loop of water that connects to buildings. That heat transfer is possible thanks to devices called heat exchangers. When cooled water in the separate loop later arrives at buildings, more heat exchangers allow it to cool down fluid in pipes that feed air-conditioning devices in individual rooms. Essentially, heat from, say, a packed conference room or tourist-filled art gallery is gradually transferred—pipe by pipe—to a river or lake.
The efficiency of Paris’ system varies throughout the year, but even at the height of summer, when the Seine is warm, the coefficient of performance (COP)—how many kilowatt-hours of cooling energy you get for every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed by the system—does not dip much below 4. In the winter, when offices, museums, and hospitals still require some air-conditioning, the COP can be as high as 15, much higher than conventional air-conditioning systems. “It is absolutely magnificent,” boasts Nayral.
But those summer temperatures are increasingly a concern. This summer, the Seine briefly exceeded 27 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Fahrenheit), says Nayral. How can that cool anything? The answer is chiller devices, which help to provide additional cooling for the water that circulates around buildings. Instead of blowing out hot air, those devices can expel their heat into the Seine via the river loop. The opportunity to keep doing this is narrowing, though—because Fraîcheur de Paris is not allowed to return water to the Seine at temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, for environmental reasons. At present, that means the river can accommodate only a few additional degrees of heat on the hottest days. Future, stronger heat waves could evaporate more of that overhead.
As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre, Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of Energy report from July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal. That report was the scientific equivalent of a bespoke suit. Given that President Trump had declared climate change to be a “hoax,” and given that Energy Secretary Christopher Wright had previously declared it to be a “side effect of building the modern world,” it stands to reason that Wright’s department picked to conduct its report exactly five climate researchers, all notable for careers in which they’ve stood conspicuously outside the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a grave and immediate danger. These five duly concluded, among other things, that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
The rest of the Trumpian apparatus then swung into motion. Lee Zeldin, the former congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate from New York who somehow ended up as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and who had declared that his goal is to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion,” embraced the findings, and quickly moved to use them in his effort to overturn the “endangerment finding” that the E.P.A. had previously relied on to regulate greenhouse gases.
The D.O.E report, however, had to be opened up for public comment, and so a climate scientist at Texas A. & M. University, Andrew Dessler, used the social-media platform Bluesky (which has largely replaced X for scientific conversation) to start assembling a global team of eighty-six researchers from all the relevant disciplines who, in a matter of a few weeks, subjected the report’s findings to peer review. Their “comment” is two and a half times as long as the report, and it is almost painfully hilarious to read. For instance, the five skeptics contended that “meteorological drought” was not increasing in the United States; as the researchers point out in their response, this is cherry-picked nonsense. In the first place, “meteorological drought” is only a measure of how much rain falls; the hotter temperatures associated with climate change have been increasing evaporation, which dries up more of that rain. And, in any event, the contrarians used the entire continental U.S. as the statistical basis for their finding, which makes no sense: as global warming increases evaporation in the arid West, it also increases rainfall in the moist East, producing the flooding rains that have caused so much damage in regions like the Appalachians. As the comment archly points out, “taking an average across the CONUS runs the risk of averaging out these trends.” Indeed, the authors note, with all the scientific citations, that “research has indicated that recent droughts in the WUS were more severe than droughts over the past 1000+ years: while megadroughts have occurred in the paleoclimatic record, the western US megadrought of 2000-2018 was the worst since the mid-1500 (Williams et al.2020) and from 2000-2021 was the worst since 800 (Williams et al. 2022) as defined using soil moisture anomalies. Similarly, climate change made the 2012-2014 period in CA the driest period in 1200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014; Williams et al. 2015).”
The comment has sections like this on every topic raised by the D.O.E. report; it’s a blitzkrieg of studies, observations, and data which makes clear that the authors were miles out of their depth, and further still out of the mainstream. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily count for much in the current dispensation, where reality is becoming a Choose Your Own Adventure story. In the wake of the resignations of four officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, some early-summer remarks from the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., started popping up again on social media. He’d told Tucker Carlson that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation—and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship—to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”
That’s clearly not true about vaccines—we’ve trusted the experts for a century, and it’s worked out pretty well, including during the COVID pandemic, when vaccines saved millions of lives. And it’s a clearly absurd thing to say about global warming: Are we planning to “do our own research” on, to pick a topic covered at length in Tuesday’s response by the eighty-six researchers, the “hemispheric symmetry of the planetary albedo”?
The American scientific enterprise, the source of so much wealth and national prestige, is being unravelled before our eyes—research grants are being cut off, satellites disconnected, reports cooked up to meet the needs of particular industries and ideologies. It is as sad as any of the other dismal effects of the past election. But the scientific method will not, perhaps, go quietly. With hundreds of years of patient work behind it, with some educational institutions willing to protect their scientists, and with researchers hard at work in less-benighted nations, the human desire to know and to understand will continue to produce results. Many of those findings will be contrary to the interests of the blowhards who, at least temporarily, control our nation, and so they may be suppressed for the moment. But whether or not they are heeded, in the end, the truth will out. If it’s not in the form of enlightened policy, it will be in the form of pandemics and wildfires, of untreated disease and rising sea level. Because life really is like this. ♦
Just months ago, the world’s largest iceberg weighed about a trillion tons and covered an area nearly the size of Anchorage, Alaska. Now it’s less than half that—and rapidly disappearing.
In recent weeks, massive chunks of ice measuring up to 250 square miles (400 square kilometers) have sloughed off the ‘megaberg’ known as A23a. Smaller pieces float freely in the surrounding waters too, many of them still big enough to threaten ships.
The iceberg’s disintegration has reduced its total area to 683 square miles (1,770 square kilometers), according to an Agence France-Presse analysis of satellite images captured by the European Union Earth observation monitor Copernicus. It could disappear completely within weeks.
Andrew Meijers, a physical oceanographer from the British Antarctic Survey, told AFP that A23a was “breaking up fairly dramatically” as it drifted further north. “I’d say it’s very much on its way out…it’s basically rotting underneath,” he said. “The water is way too warm for it to maintain. It’s constantly melting.”
End of the line
This could mark the end of A23a’s 40-year-long journey, which started when the iceberg broke off Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It remained grounded on the bottom of the Weddell Sea for more than 30 years before detaching and beginning its slow drift northward in 2020. Over the next four years, A23a followed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current on a path known as “Iceberg Alley” and then became trapped in an ocean vortex near the South Orkney Islands in April 2024.
As A23a has encountered huge waves and increasingly warmer waters, it’s been crumbling into the ocean. Losing half its size in a matter of months is staggering, but most icebergs never make it this far from the frigid waters of Antarctica, Meijers said. “This one’s really big so it has lasted longer and gone further than others,” he explained.
Still, A23a is shrinking faster than new ice can form. “I expect that to continue in the coming weeks, and expect it won’t be really identifiable within a few weeks,” Meijers said. It’s unclear how much water this megaberg contained at its peak, but the similarly sized A68a dumped more than 1 trillion tons of fresh water into the ocean during its lifetime.
A warning sign
Contrary to popular belief, melting icebergs—even giants like A68a and A23a—don’t raise global sea levels. That’s because they’re already floating in the ocean. However, their rapid disappearance is a clear sign of rising global temperatures, which do contribute to sea level rise by accelerating glacial melt.
Recent research estimates that Antarctica’s ice sheet could raise global sea levels 11 inches (28 centimeters) by 2100, and potentially more if we surpass certain warming thresholds. That said, much remains unknown about the processes that underlie accelerated sea level rise. Despite uncertainties in future projections, the disappearance of Antarctic behemoths like A23a serves as a stark reminder of how rapidly humans are reshaping this critical region.
