As the extended 4th of July holiday weekend looms on the horizon severe storms are set to take aim across a wide swath from New York and Pennsylvania stretching down to Arkansas.
On Sunday, 51 million people in this area are at risk for severe thunderstorms from afternoon through evening. The risk area includes Nashville, Louisville, Philadelphia, Memphis, Baltimore, Charlotte and Washington D.C.
The strongest storms will target Kentucky and Tennessee, potentially bringing damaging wind gusts over 65 mph and ping pong size hail — although a tornado or two can’t be ruled out.
Scattered showers will persist throughout Sunday, with the strongest storms set to initiate in Kentucky and Tennessee after 2 p.m. CT. This threat will persist into the evening and overnight hours as the line of storms shifts into the Appalachians.
On Monday, this storm system will target the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic region, targeting 29 million in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte, and Raleigh. Damaging wind, large hail, and a tornado or two will be possible.
As the July 4th holiday approaches, the Northeast and the Southeast can expect scattered showers and temperatures in the 80s and 90s respectively.
The Midwest and the Rockies regions may experience rainfall, while the West will have sunny and dry climbs with temperatures ranging from 70 to the 100s.
Around 63 million remain under heat alerts Sunday afternoon from coast-to-coast, including Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, Tallahassee, Montgomery, New Orleans, Corpus Christi, Phoenix, Tucson, Bakersfield, Sacramento, and Portland.
More than 30 records will be threatened Sunday across eight different states, including the cities of Tucson, Tampa, Phoenix, Fresno, Palm Springs, Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Asheville.
On Saturday in Tallahassee temperatures reached a high of 100 degrees, tying a record high set in 1990, according to the National Weather Service. In New Orleans, a heat alert will be in effect on Monday.
“Heat indices up to 110 are expected,” the service said in a tweet. “Practice heat safety and take care of yourself!”
Like on Saturday, highs in the Southeast will soar into the 90s, with heat index values close to 115 degrees. Luckily, a passing cold front will help temperatures drop closer to seasonal highs for the remainder of the holiday week.
In the West, heat alerts continue through Tuesday as afternoon highs range from 100 to 120 degrees. Temperatures will drop to at or below average temperatures across California and Arizona for the second half of the week.
It was a smell that invoked a memory. Both for Emily Kuchlbauer in North Carolina and Ryan Bomba in Chicago. It was smoke from wildfires, the odor of an increasingly hot and occasionally on-fire world.
Kuchlbauer had flashbacks to the surprise of soot coating her car three years ago when she was a recent college graduate in San Diego. Bomba had deja vu from San Francisco, where the air was so thick with smoke people had to mask up. They figured they left wildfire worries behind in California, but a Canada that’s burning from sea to warming sea brought one of the more visceral effects of climate change home to places that once seemed immune.
“It’s been very apocalyptic feeling, because in California the dialogue is like, ‘Oh, it’s normal. This is just what happens on the West Coast,’ but it’s very much not normal here,” Kuchlbauer said.
Canadian officials say heavy rain in Quebec in recent days missed the places where wildfires are most active, and they expect air quality to remain a concern through the summer, as long as the fires continue.
Threatened by possible shortages of lithium for electric car batteries, automakers are racing to lock in supplies of the once-obscure “white gold” in a politically and environmentally fraught competition from China to Nevada to Chile.
Leftist candidate Olivia Chow has become the mayor of Canada’s largest city. Chow is Toronto’s new mayor after more than a decade of conservative rule.
Men’s national team coach John Herdman says the Canadian Soccer Association must quicky address its financial troubles.
As Earth’s climate continues to change from heat-trapping gases spewed into the air, ever fewer people are out of reach from the billowing and deadly fingers of wildfire smoke, scientists say. Already wildfires are consuming three times more of the United States and Canada each year than in the 1980s and studies predict fire and smoke to worsen.
While many people exposed to bad air may be asking themselves if this is a “new normal,” several scientists told The Associated Press they specifically reject any such idea because the phrase makes it sound like the world has changed to a new and steady pattern of extreme events.
“Is this a new normal? No, it’s a new abnormal,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said. “It continues to get worse. If we continue to warm the planet, we don’t settle into some new state. It’s an ever-moving baseline of worse and worse.”
It’s so bad that perhaps the term “wildfire” also needs to be rethought, suggested Woodwell Climate Research Center senior scientist Jennifer Francis.
“We can’t really call them wildfires anymore,” Francis said. “To some extent they’re just not, they’re not wild. They’re not natural anymore. We are just making them more likely. We’re making them more intense.”
FILE – People wear face masks as they walk outside in the smoke-filled air in Herald Square, June 7, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
Several scientists told the AP that the problem of smoke and wildfires will progressively worsen until the world significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, which has not happened despite years of international negotiations and lofty goals.
Fires in North America are generally getting worse, burning more land. Even before July, traditionally the busiest fire month for the country, Canada has set a record for most area burned with 31,432 square miles (81,409 square kilometers), which is nearly 15% higher than the old record.
“A year like this could happen with or without climate change, but warming temperatures just made it a lot more probable,” said A. Park Williams, a UCLA bioclimatologist who studies fire and water. “We’re seeing, especially across the West, big increases in smoke exposure and reduction in air quality that are attributable to increase in fire activity.”
FILE – The Statue of Liberty, covered in a haze-filled sky, is photographed from the Staten Island Ferry, June 7, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
As the atmosphere dries, it sucks moisture out of plants, creating more fuel that burns easier, faster and with greater intensity. Then you add more lightning strikes from more storms, some of which are dry lightning strikes, said Canadian fire scientist Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. Fire seasons are getting longer, starting earlier and lasting later because of warmer weather, he said.
“We have to learn to live with fire and smoke, that’s the new reality,” Flannigan said.
Ronak Bhatia, who moved from California to Illinois for college in 2018 and now lives in Chicago, said at first it seemed like a joke: wildfire smoke following him and his friends from the West Coast. But if it continues, it will no longer be as funny.
“It makes you think about climate change and also how it essentially could affect, you know, anywhere,” Bhatia said. “It’s not just the California problem or Australia problem. It’s kind of an everywhere problem.”
Wildfires in the U.S. on average now burn about 12,000 square miles (31,000 square kilometers) yearly, about the size of Maryland. From 1983 to 1987, when the National Interagency Fire Center started keeping statistics, only about 3,300 square miles (8,546 square kilometers) burned annually.
FILE – People fish on the Susquehanna River amidst haze from Canadian wildfires, June 29, 2023, in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
During the past five years, including a record low 2020, Canada has averaged 12,279 square miles (31,803 square kilometers) burned, which is three and a half times larger than the 1983 to 1987 average.
The type of fires seen this year in western Canada are in amounts scientists and computer models predicted for the 2030s and 2040s. And eastern Canada, where it rains more often, wasn’t supposed to see occasional fire years like this until the mid 21st century, Flannigan said.
If the Canadian east is burning, that means eventually, and probably sooner than researchers thought, eastern U.S. states will also, Flannigan said. He and Williams pointed to devastating fires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that killed 14 people in 2016 during a brief drought in the East.
America burned much more in the past, but that’s because people didn’t try to stop fires and they were less of a threat. The West used to have larger and regular fires until the mid-19th century, with more land settlement and then the U.S. government trying to douse every fire after the great 1910 Yellowstone fire, Williams said.
FILE – People in kayaks paddle in McCovey Cove outside Oracle Park in San Francisco during a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Seattle Mariners on Sept. 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File)
Since about the 1950s, America pretty much got wildfires down to a minimum, but that hasn’t been the case since about 2000.
“We thought we had it under control, but we don’t,” Williams said. “The climate changed so much that we lost control of it.”
The warmer the Arctic gets and the more snow and ice melt there — the Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of Earth — the differences in the summer between Arctic and mid-latitudes get smaller. That allows the jet stream of air high above the ground to meander and get stuck, prolonging bouts of bad weather, Mann and Francis said. Other scientists say they are waiting for more evidence on the impact of bouts of stuck weather.
For people exposed to nasty air from wildfire smoke, increasing threats to health are part of the new reality.
Wildfires expose about 44 million people per year worldwide to unhealthy air, causing about 677,000 deaths annually with almost 39% of them children, according to a 2021 study out of the United Kingdom.
FILE – A person walks along the shore of Lake Michigan as the downtown skyline is blanketed in haze from Canadian wildfires, June 27, 2023, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)
Based on peer-reviewed studies, the Health Effects Institute estimated that smoke’s chief pollutant caused 4 million deaths worldwide and nearly 48,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2019.
The tiny particles making up a main pollutant of wildfire smoke, called PM2.5, are just the right size to embed deep in the lungs and absorb into the blood. But while their size has garnered attention, their composition also matters, said Kris Ebi, a University of Washington climate and health scientist.
“There is emerging evidence that the toxicity of wildfire smoke PM2.5 is more toxic than what comes out of tailpipes,” Ebi said.
A cascade of health effects may become a growing problem in the wake of wildfires, including downwind from the source, said Ed Avol, professor emeritus at the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California.
Beyond irritated eyes and scratchy throats, breathing in wildfire smoke also can create long-term issues all over the body. Avol said those include respiratory effects including asthma and COPD, as well as impacts on heart, brain and kidney function.
“In the longer term, climate change and unfortunately wildfire smoke is not going away because we really haven’t done that much quick enough to make a difference,” Avol said, adding that while people can take steps like masking up or using air filters to try to protect themselves, we are ultimately “behind the curve here in terms of responding to it.”
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Borenstein reported from Washington and Walling from Chicago.
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
DOWNIEVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Using chainsaws, heavy machinery and controlled burns, the Biden administration is trying to turn the tide on worsening wildfires in the U.S. West through a multi-billion dollar cleanup of forests choked with dead trees and undergrowth.
Yet one year into what’s envisioned as a decade-long effort, federal land managers are scrambling to catch up after falling behind on several of their priority forests for thinning even as they exceeded goals elsewhere. And they’ve skipped over some highly at-risk communities to work in less threatened areas, according to data obtained by The Associated Press, public records and Congressional testimony.
With climate change making the situation increasingly dire, mixed early results from the administration’s initiative underscore the challenge of reversing decades of lax forest management and aggressive fire suppression that allowed many woodlands to become tinderboxes. The ambitious effort comes amid pushback from lawmakers dissatisfied with progress to date and criticism from some environmentalists for cutting too many trees.
The haze of unhealthy air that settled over the Great Lakes region Tuesday reminded U.S. residents from the Midwest to the Northeast and as far south as Kentucky to brace for more depending on which way the wind blows as Canadian wildfires rage on.
Canadian officials say rainfall likely won’t be enough to extinguish the wildfires ravaging northern Quebec, but the wet weather could give firefighters a chance to get ahead of the flames as the country surpassed the record for area burned by wildfires this week.
Drifting smoke from the ongoing wildfires across Canada is creating curtains of haze and raising air quality concerns throughout the Great Lakes region, and in parts of the central and eastern United States.
Wildfire smoke from Canada has prompted officials to issue a record 23rd air quality alert for much of Minnesota through late Wednesday night as smoky skies obscure the Minneapolis and St.
Administration officials in interviews and during testimony maintained that the thinning work is making a difference. Work announced to date, they said, will help lessen wildfire dangers faced by more than 500 communities in 10 states. But they also acknowledged finishing the task will require far more resources than what’s already dedicated.
“As much money as we’re receiving, it’s not enough to take care of the problems that we are seeing, particularly across the West,” said Forest Service Chief Randy Moore. “This is an emergency situation in many places, and we are acting with a sense of urgency.”
BIG MONEY FOR BIG PROBLEM
Congress in the last two years approved more than $4 billion in additional funding to prevent repeats of destructive infernos that have torched communities including in California, Colorado and Montana.
By logging and burning trees and low-lying vegetation, officials hope to lessen forest fuels and keep fires that originate on federal lands from exploding through nearby cities and towns.
The enormity of the task is evident in an aerial view of California’s Tahoe National Forest, where mountainsides are colored brown and gray with the vast number of trees killed by insects and drought. After work on the Tahoe was delayed last year, Forest Service crews and contractors recently started taking down trees across thousands of acres.
“The forests as we know them in California and across the West, they’re dying. They’re being destroyed through fire. They’re dying from drought, disease and insects,” said forest Supervisor Eli Ilano. “They’re dying at a pace that we’re having trouble keeping up with.”
The scale of spending is unprecedented, said Courtney Schultz with Colorado State University. The forest policy expert said millions of acres have been through environmental review and are ready for work.
“If we really want to go big across the landscape — to reduce fuels enough to affect fire behavior and have some impact on communities — we need to be planning large projects,” she said.
Key to that strategy is addressing forest patches where computer simulations show wildfire could easily spread to inhabited areas. Some areas have yet to get the extra funding for thinning despite facing high risk, including portions of California’s Sierra Nevada range, Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and around Mescalero Apache lands in southern New Mexico.
Only about a third of the land the U.S. Forest Service treated last year was designated with high wildfire hazard potential, agency documents show. About half the forest was in the southeastern U.S., where wildfires are less severe but weather conditions make it easier to use intentional burns, the documents show.
The infrastructure bill passed two years ago with bipartisan support included a requirement for the administration to treat forests across 10 million acres — 15,625 square miles or 40,500 square kilometers — by 2027. Less than 10% of that was addressed in the first year.
“The Forest Service is obligating hundreds of millions of dollars, but not in the areas required by law,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Forest Service spokesman Wade Muehlhof said the agency was confident in the administration’s strategy, but declined to say if it would meet the acreage mandates.
MIXED FIRST-YEAR RESULTS
An AP analysis of federal data reveals the scale of the challenge: Hundreds of communities are threatened by the potential for fires to ignite on federal forests and spread to populated areas.
In California, thinning zones announced to date address the risk to only about one-in-five houses and other buildings potentially exposed to fires on federal lands, the analysis shows. In Nevada and Oregon, it’s about half of exposed structures, and in Montana it’s one-in 25.
A crew member uses a tree processor to strip bark and branches from logs before being transported to a mill, Tuesday, June 6, 2023, near Camptonville, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
Tahoe National Forest supervisor Eli Ilano, foreground, walks past a pile of cut down trees, Tuesday, June 6, 2023, near Camptonville, Calif. “The forests as we know them in California and across the West, they’re dying,” Ilano said. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez) –
Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP
The stump of a tree can be seen in the Tahoe National Forest, Tuesday, June 6, 2023, near Camptonville, Calif. Using chainsaws, heavy machinery and controlled burns, the Biden administration is trying to turn the tide on worsening wildfires in the U.S. West through a multi-billion dollar cleanup of forests choked with dead trees and undergrowth. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez) –
Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP
Trees are visible from the town of Downieville, Calif., Tuesday, June 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
Most areas identified as hot spots where forest fires have high potential to burn into populated areas won’t be addressed for at least the next several years, according to government planning documents. And computer models project up to 20% of areas that need thinning will be hit by fires before that work occurs.
Architects of the Forest Service’s strategy based it on tens millions of computer wildfire simulations being used to predict areas that pose the greatest risk. Those scenarios showed fires on only 10% to 20% of the land would account for 80% of exposure to communities.
“This is a mapped plan through time, where we can laser-focus on one highly important issue: the problem of communities being destroyed by wildfires started on public lands,” said Forest Service fire scientist Alan Ager.
FALLING SHORT IN A RISKY AREA
In 2022, the Forest Service missed its treatment goals in four of 10 areas targeted as priorities. One was the Tahoe National Forest’s North Yuba region, where the agency addressed only 6% of the acreage planned.
Small towns tucked into the forest’s canyons escaped disaster two years ago when the Dixie fire raged just to the north, destroying several communities and burning about 1,500 square miles (3,900 square kilometers) in the Sierra Nevada range. Those communities also escaped another fire to the south that burned more than 1,000 homes and structures. The previous year, yet another fire killed 15 people and torched more than 2,000 homes and structures in the region.
The same conditions that whipped those fires into infernos exist on the Tahoe forest — densely-packed trees and underbrush primed to burn following years of drought. And government computer modeling suggests it’s among the U.S. communities most exposed to wildfires on federal lands.
Five million trees died on the Tahoe last year alone, said Ilano, the forest supervisor.
“What we’re realizing is we’re not moving fast enough, that the fires are burning bigger and more intense, more quickly than we anticipated,” Ilano said.
FILE – An air tanker drops fire retardant to battle the Dixie Fire in the Feather River Canyon in Plumas County, Calif., July 14, 2021. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee via AP)
FILE – Fire Battalion Chief Craig Newell carries a hose while battling the North Complex Fire in Plumas National Forest, Calif., on Sept. 14, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)
Earlier this month, tracked vehicles including one known as a “harvester” worked through dense stands on the North Yuba, clipping large trees at their base and stripping them bare of branches in just seconds, then piling the trunks to be burned later. Elsewhere, work crews walked slowly behind a wood chipper as it was pulled along a forest road, stuffing the machine with small trees and branches cut to clear the understory.
The increased logging needed to reach the government’s lofty goals has gained acceptance as the growing toll from wildfires softens longstanding opposition from some environmental groups and ecologists.
“Gone are the days when things were black and white and either good or bad,” said Melinda Booth, former director of the South Yuba River Citizens League. “We need targeted treatment, targeted thinning, which does include logging.”
Others think officials are going too far. Sue Britting with Sierra Forest Legacy says the North Yuba plan includes about nine square miles (23 square kilometers) of older trees and stands along waterways that should be preserved. Yet for most of the work, Britting said it’s time to “move forward” on a thinning project years in the making.
OBSTACLES TO THINNING STRATEGY
Hindering the Forest Service nationwide is a shortage of workers to cut and remove trees on the scale demanded, government officials and forestry experts say. Litigation ties up many projects, with environmental reviews taking three years on average before work begins, according to the Property and Environment Research Center, a Bozeman, Montana think tank.
Another problem: Thinning operations aren’t allowed in federally designated wilderness areas. That puts off limits about a third of National Forest areas that expose communities to high wildfire risk and means some thinning work must be carried out in a patchwork fashion.
Keeping track of progress presents its own challenges. Acres that get worked on are often counted twice or more — first when the trees are cut down, again when leftover piles of woody material on the same site are removed, and yet again when that landscape is later subjected to prescribed fire, said Schultz of Colorado State University.
Even where thinning is allowed, officials face other potential constraints, such as protecting older groves important for wildlife habitat. A Biden inventory of public lands in April identified more than 175,000 square miles (453,000 square kilometers) of old growth and mature forests on U.S. government land.
The inventory will be used to craft new rules to better protect those woodlands from fires, insects and other side effects of climate change. But there’s overlap between older forests and many areas slated for thinning. That includes more than half of the treatment area at North Yuba, according to an AP analysis of mature forest data compiled by the conservation group Wild Heritage.
“What’s driving all of this is insect infestation, drought stress, and all of that is related to the climate,” said Wild Heritage chief scientist Dominick DellaSalla. “I don’t think you can get out of it by thinning.”
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
When it comes to flying, going green may cost you more. And it’s going to take a while for the strategy to take off.
Sustainability was a hot topic this week at the Paris Air Show, the world’s largest event for the aviation industry, which faces increasing pressure to reduce the climate-changing greenhouse gases that aircraft spew.
Even the massive orders at the show got a emissions-reduction spin: Airlines and manufacturers said the new planes will be more fuel-efficient than the ones they replace.
Inflation is pushing in different directions in Europe, rising in Germany and falling again in Spain.
Halfway into 2023, and so little on Wall Street has gone according to plan. The S&P 500 has climbed roughly 14% as one of the most-predicted and longest awaited recessions in history has yet to appear.
Royal accounts show that a change in monarchs, double-digit inflation and ongoing costs of renovating Buckingham Palace contributed to a 5% increase in publicly-funded spending by Britain’s royals.
Applications for unemployment benefits fell significantly last week after it appeared claims had reached a modestly elevated level in recent weeks.
But most of those planes will burn conventional, kerosene-based jet fuel. Startups are working feverishly on electric-powered aircraft, but they won’t catch on as quickly as electric vehicles.
“It’s a lot easier to pack a heavy battery into a vehicle if you don’t have to lift it off the ground,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University.
That means sustainable aviation fuel has become the industry’s best hope to achieve its promise of net zero emissions by 2050. Aviation produces 2% to 3% of worldwide carbon emissions, but its share is expected to grow as travel increases and other industries become greener.
Sustainable fuel, however, accounts for just 0.1% of all jet fuel. Made from sources like used cooking oil and plant waste, SAF can be blended with conventional jet fuel but costs much more.
Suppliers are “going to be able to kind of set the price,” Molly Wilkinson, an American Airlines vice president, said at the air show. “And we fear that at that point, that price eventually is going to trickle down to the passenger in some form of a ticket price.”
With such a limited supply, critics say airlines are making overly ambitious promises and exaggerating how quickly they can ramp up the use of SAF. The industry even has skeptics: Nearly one-third of aviation sustainability officers in a GE Aerospace survey doubt the industry will hit its net zero goal by 2050.
Delta Air Lines is being sued in U.S. federal court by critics who say the carrier falsely bills itself as the world’s first carbon-neutral airline, and that Delta’s claim rests on carbon offsets that are largely bogus. The Atlanta-based airline says the charges are “without legal merit.”
Across the Atlantic, a consumer group known by its French acronym, BEUC, filed a complaint this week with the European Union’s executive arm, accusing 17 airlines of greenwashing.
The group says airlines are misleading consumers and violating rules on unfair commercial practices by encouraging customers to pay extra to help finance development of SAF and offset future carbon emissions created by flying.
In one case, the group’s researchers found Air France charging up to 138 euros ($150) for the green option.
“Sustainable aviation fuels, they are indeed the biggest technological potential to decarbonize the aviation sector, but the main problem … is that they are not available,” said Dimitri Vergne, a senior policy officer at BEUC.
“We know that before the end of the next decade — at least — they won’t be available in massive quantities” and won’t be the main source of fuel for planes, Vergne added.
Producers say SAF reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80%, compared with regular jet fuel, over its life cycle.
Airlines have been talking about becoming greener for years. They were rattled by the rise of “flight shaming,” a movement that encourages people to find less-polluting forms of transportation — or reduce travel altogether.
The United States is pushing incentives instead of mandates.
A law signed last year by President Joe Biden will provide tax breaks for developing cleaner jet fuel, but one of the credits will expire in just two years. Wilkinson, the American Airlines executive, said that was too short to entice sustainable fuel producers and that the credit should be extended by 10 years or longer.
The International Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, estimates that SAF could contribute 65% of the emissions reductions needed for the industry to hit its 2050 net-zero goal.
But very few flights are powered by SAF because of the limited supply and infrastructure.
Just before the Paris Air Show opened, President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would contribute 200 million euros ($218 million) toward a 1 billion euro ($1.1 billion) plant to make SAF.
Many airlines have touted investments in SAF producers such as World Energy, which has a plant in Paramount, California, and Finland’s Neste.
United Airlines plans to triple its use of SAF this year, to 10 million gallons — but it burned 3.6 billion gallons of fuel last year.
Some see sustainable fuel as a bridge to cleaner technologies, including larger electric planes or aircraft powered by hydrogen. But packing enough power to run a large electric plane would require a fantastic leap in battery technology.
Hydrogen must be chilled and stored somewhere — it couldn’t be carried in the wings of today’s planes, as jet fuel is.
“Hydrogen sounds like a good idea. The problem is the more you look into the details, the more you realize it’s an engineering challenge but also an economics challenge,” Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consultancy, said at the Paris Air Show. “It’s within the realm of possibility, (but) not for the next few decades.”
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This story has been corrected to note that Wagner is at Columbia University, not New York University.
Koenig reported from Dallas. AP journalists Jade Le Deley and Tristan Werkmeister in Le Bourget, France, and Kelvin Chan in Toronto contributed.
Shanton Alcaraz from the Salvation Army Northwest Division gives bottled water to Eddy Norby who lives in an RV and invites him to their nearby cooling center for food and beverages during a heat wave in Seattle, Washington, U.S., June 27, 2021.
Karen Ducey | Reuters
Multnomah County in Oregon is suing oil and gas companies Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and related organizations for the damages caused by the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. Multnomah County said these and other fossil fuel companies and entities operating in the region are significantly responsible for causing and worsening the deadly heat event.
“The combined historical carbon pollution from the use of Defendants’ fossil fuel products was a substantial factor in causing and exacerbating the heat dome, which smothered the County’s residents for several days,” Multnomah County alleges, according to a written statement released Thursday.
Multnomah County is seeking $50 million in actual damages, $1.5 billion in future damages, and an estimated $50 billion for an abatement fund to “weatherproof” the city, its infrastructure and public health services in preparation for future extreme weather events.
Starting on June 25, 2021, Multnomah County had three consecutive days where the heat reached 108, 112 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. Each of those days was about 40 degrees above the regional average and were the hottest days in the County’s recorded history.
The heat event is called a heat dome which is a weather event caused by a high-pressure system that in this case prevented cooler maritime winds to blow and also prevented clouds from forming.
The heat caused the deaths of 69 people, and property damage and was a draw on taxpayer resources, Multnomah County says.
Multiple climate scientists researched the cause of the heat dome and all said that the event was caused by excessive carbon dioxide emissions released by the burning of fossil fuels, the plaintiff says.
“The heat dome that cost so much life and loss was not a natural weather event. It did not just happen because life can be cruel, nor can it be rationalized as simply a mystery of God’s will,” the lawsuit reads. “Rather, the heat dome was a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ decision to sell as many fossil fuel products over the last six decades as they could and to lie to the County, the public, and the scientific community about the catastrophic harm that pollution from those products into the Earth’s and the County’s atmosphere would cause.”
“This lawsuit is about accountability and fairness, and I believe the people of Multnomah County deserve both. These businesses knew their products were unsafe and harmful, and they lied about it,” Pederson said in a written statement announcing the lawsuit. “They have profited massively from their lies and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages. We say enough is enough.”
The plaintiffs allege the defendants committed negligence and fraud and created a public nuisance.
Bill Forte from North Sky Communications works on a fiber optic line during a heat wave gripping the Pacific Northwest in Lake Forest Park, Washington, U.S., June 26, 2021.
Karen Ducey | Reuters
“There are no new laws or novel theories being asserted here. We contend that the Defendants broke long-standing ones, and we will prove it to a jury,” Jeffrey Simon, a partner at Simon Greenstone Panatier, said in a statement.
“We will show that the normal use of fossil fuel products over time has imposed massive external, unpriced and untraded social, economic and environmental costs on the County. We will show that they were aware of this price, and instead of fully informing the public, they deceived us. And we will ask a jury to decide if it is fair to hold the polluters accountable for these avoidable and rising costs,” Worthington said in a written statement.
“We are confident that, once we show what the fossil fuel companies knew about global warming and when, and what they did to deny, delay and deceive the public, the jury will not let the fossil fuel companies get away with their reckless misconduct,” Worthington said.
“Suits like these continue to waste time, resources and do nothing to address climate change,” a spokesperson for Exxon told CNBC. “This action has no impact on our intention to invest billions of dollars to leading the way in a thoughtful energy transition that takes the world to net zero carbon emissions.”
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group for the oil and gas industry, defended its constituents’ work making energy available to consumers and, like Exxon, called the lawsuit unproductive.
“The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to U.S. consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint,” Ryan Meyers, senior vice president and general counsel for API, told CNBC in a statement. “This ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless lawsuits against our industry is nothing more than a distraction from important issues and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources. Climate policy is for Congress to debate and decide, not the court system.”
Legal counsel for Chevron called the lawsuit unproductive and unconstitutional.
“Addressing the challenge of global climate change requires a coordinated policy response. These lawsuits are counterproductive distractions from advancing international policy solutions,” Theodore Boutrous, Jr. of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, told CNBC in a statement. “The federal Constitution bars these novel, baseless claims that target one industry and group of companies engaged in lawful activity that provides tremendous benefits to society.”
People sleep at a cooling shelter set up during an unprecedented heat wave in Portland, Oregon, U.S. June 27, 2021.
Maranie Staab | Reuters
Shell said it is working toward a low-carbon future and does not see a lawsuit as productive.
“The Shell Group’s position on climate change has been a matter of public record for decades. We agree that action is needed now on climate change, and we fully support the need for society to transition to a lower-carbon future. As we supply vital energy the world needs today, we continue to reduce our emissions and help customers reduce theirs,” a Shell spokesperson told CNBC.
“Addressing climate change requires a collaborative, society-wide approach. We do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change, but that smart policy from government and action from all sectors is the appropriate way to reach solutions and drive progress,” Shell said.
ConocoPhillips and the Western States Petroleum Association told CNBC they don’t comment on active litigation.
BP, Motiva, Occidental Petroleum, Space Age Fuel, Valero Energy, Total Specialties USA, Marathon Petroleum, Peabody Energy, the Koch Industries, and McKinsey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Financing for clean energy in developing and emerging economies, excluding China, must increase seven-fold within a decade if global warming is to be capped at tolerable levels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.
To keep temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels, annual investments in non-fossil fuel energy in these Global South countries will need to jump from $260bn to nearly $2 trillion, the intergovernmental agency said in a report on Wednesday.
“Financing clean energy in the emerging and developing world is the fault line of reaching international climate goals,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told journalists.
The report was released on the eve of the two-day Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, which seeks to galvanise support for revamping the mid-20th century architecture governing financial flows from rich to developing nations.
G20 nations are historically responsible for 80 percent of global carbon emissions, which are wreaking havoc on the Earth’s climate.
“Many vulnerable, lower-income states have been overwhelmed by economic shocks, debts they cannot pay, and the effects of climate change – a crisis to which they contributed very little, but which is costing people in these countries dearly,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement.
“These are unprecedented challenges that require a rethink of how the world’s financial architecture is set up.”
Private investment
Speeding the transition from dirty to clean energy and helping the Global South cope with and prepare for devastating climate impacts are high on the summit agenda.
Nearly 800 million people lack electricity and 2.4 billion have no access to clean cooking fuels, most of whom reside in poor and emerging countries.
Under current policy trends, one-third of the rise in energy use in these nations over the next decade will be met by burning fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming, the IEA warned.
According to Birol, investments in clean energy are increasing, but “the bad news is that more than 90 percent of that increase in clean energy since the Paris Agreement in 2015 comes from advanced economies and China.”
To unlock the potential for clean energy in emerging and developing economies, the report emphasized the need for greater international technical, regulatory and financial support.
Based on the IEA’s report, two-thirds of the financing for clean energy projects in emerging and developing economies excluding China “will need to come from the private sector” because public sector investments are “insufficient to deliver universal access to energy and tackle climate change”.
🗣”The investment needs go well beyond the capacity of public financing alone, making it urgent to rapidly scale up much greater private financing for clean energy projects in emerging & developing economies”
With China included in the calculation, private and public money pouring into renewables and other forms of carbon-neutral energy will need to more than triple from $770bn in 2022 to $2.5 trillion per year by the early 2030s.
Within the next decade, today’s $135bn in annual private financing for clean energy in these economies must rise to about $1 trillion a year.
Solar energy: Leading alternative
According to the IEA report, there is potential for rapidly ramping up renewable energy. Solar power is now the cheapest source of electricity generation across almost the entire world.
At least 40 percent of the global solar radiation reaching the planet lands on sub-Saharan Africa, and yet nearly 10 times more solar capacity was installed in China last year than across the entire African continent.
Sunny sub-Saharan Africa generates less solar electricity than the Netherlands, Birol noted.
Amnesty raised the issue that lower income countries “cannot fairly phase out fossil fuels, protect people from the harms of the climate crisis and provide remedy to those most affected”, especially when wealthier countries “continue to evade their obligations of international cooperation and assistance”.
The summit in Paris on Thursday should work to ensure wealthier nations “commit to comprehensive debt relief for lower-income nations” and “honour previous financial pledges they have failed to meet” in previous climate relief pacts, Amnesty said.
“This summit should offer a chance for global leaders to protect the rights of the world’s most marginalized people – not move the burden further onto those who are suffering the most but contributed the least to causing this crisis,” its statement added.
Darby Dunn, the Vice President of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn held a handful of engineering and production roles at SpaceX.
“In one role in particular, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,’” Dunn told CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I was leading the build out of our new manufacturing facilities for the crew Dragon vehicle.”
While she was overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to making its very first spacecraft, and then to sending cargo to the International Space Station on it regularly, Dunn says.
But so far, fusion at scale remains in the realm of science fiction.
Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon rocket.
Photo courtesy Darby Dunn
Dunn says she made the switch from building rockets to working on making fusion energy a reality because she wants to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.
“I very much believe SpaceX will make life multiplanetary. I don’t know how much of that I’ll see in my lifetime,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC at the end of May.
But Dunn has spent large chunks of her life living in California, where SpaceX is based, and has very much seen the effects of climate change in the shape of wildfires and mudslides stemming from extreme rain.
“For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it. So that was the the huge shift for me to come to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.
Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the early stages, as its 10th employee, has allowed her to see a different stage on the journey of company growth, too.
“We’re a 5-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I joined SpaceX when it was 6 years old with about 500 employees. So I’ve actually been able to see the entire era that I didn’t get to experience at SpaceX and doing so at CFS.”
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
A key difference between the two jobs is the maturity of the respective industries.
“The aerospace industry has been around for a long time. So building a rocket engine, the mechanics of it look really similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works is all very, very well studied and very well understood,” Dunn told CNBC.
Fusion machines have been studied in academic settings and research labs since the early 1950s, but the entire industry is just at the very first stages of trying to prove that the science can have commercial applications. It’s being a part of that excitement that was a big draw for Dunn.
Of course, there are plenty of skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX prepared her to face the skeptics.
“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch and land rockets back from space, everybody said, ‘That’s not possible! You can’t do it!’” Dunn said, referencing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it is possible and so they were going to prove it, Dunn told CNBC.
“It took many attempts, a lot of learning, a lot of iterations on our software, many failed attempts off the boat — and then we did it. And then we did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again,” she said.
Darby Dunn, vice president of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“Now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve seen the aerospace industry shift to say, ‘Well, why aren’t these other companies also lending their rockets back from space?’ It’s completely changed the way that people are looking at it. They first said, ‘It wasn’t possible. Then, ‘OK, it is possible.’ And now it is saying, ‘Well, why isn’t everybody else jumping in?’”
Dunn is looking to be part of that kind of transition for the fusion industry at Commonwealth.
Dunn is the vice president of operations, which covers manufacturing, safety, quality and facilities. She’s helping Commonwealth make the transition from research and development-scale processes to manufacturing and full-scale production.
The company spun out of research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the company’s goal is to build 10,000 fusion power plants around the world by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.
First, however, Commonwealth has to prove that it can generate more energy in its fusion reactor than is necessary to get the reaction started, a key threshold for the fusion industry called “ignition.” To do that, the company is currently building its SPARC tokamak — a device that will help contain and control the fusion reaction. The company plans to turn it on in 2025 and demonstrate net energy shortly thereafter.
To build SPARC, Commonwealth needs to make a lot of magnets using high-temperature superconducting tape.
The advanced manufacturing facility located at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“The cool part of this building is that the concept for it started out as a doodle that I made on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To see the steel beams going up, walls going up, concrete getting poured, it’s a whole vision coming to life, which is super exciting.”
Even as Commonwealth is figuring out how to make one magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that can eventually scale to a process that looks like an automotive assembly line, she told CNBC.
Moving fast is a priority for Dunn, and the rest of the team. After building the demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the company aims to build a bigger version called ARC, which it says is going to deliver electricity to the grid. The aim is to have ARC online in the 2030s.
“The biggest thing I think about a lot is time, about how fast can we go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can get the magnets built, the sooner we can build SPARC, the sooner we can turn it on, the sooner we can get in net energy, the sooner we get to our first ARC. So I think that’s probably the element that I think about the most.”
Darby Dunn in the Commonwealth Fusion Systems advanced manufacturing facility.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Speed matters because critics argue that it will take too long to get fusion to work as an energy source to meaningfully contribute to the very urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Top climate scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that to have “no or limited” overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels will require a 45% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and hitting net zero around 2050.
“I have asked myself, ‘Why am I doing fusion as opposed to something that is going to be deployed next year?’” she told CNBC. “For me, it comes down to the fact that fusion is the most energy dense reaction in our solar system.”
But she does not believe fusion should be the only solution.
“I very much believe in in solar power and wind and a lot of other renewables — that we absolutely need those. We need those deployed now. We need those deployed all over the world,” Dunn told CNBC. “But I don’t think they will be enough to get us to 2050 and beyond.”
Electric cars, heat pumps, green steel and green cement all depend on having large quantities of clean electricity. Its Dunn’s focus to build the energy sources that the world will need in the decades and centuries to come.
If Commonwealth is going to deliver that solution, though, Dunn first has to make a whole lot of very high-powered magnets.
“My own personal opinion is I’m going to keep on keeping on — keep on building. And we have a poster in the back stairwell that says, ‘Keep calm and fuse on,” Dunn told CNBC. “Regardless of what the outside world is saying, we are working every day towards our mission of getting net-positive energy from fusion. And I look forward to proving that to the world in a couple of years.”
A smokey haze blankets Times Square in New York City as smoke from Canada’s wildfires moves down the Northeastern U.S.
Photo: Jadyn Kist
New York City’s air pollution ranked the worst of any city in the world on Wednesday as wildfire smoke from Canada continued to drift over the area, creating a second day of orange haze over the city and prompting some residents to wear face masks outdoors.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the city reached an AQI of 342, a level considered “hazardous” for all residents.
The city’s schools are open but are not having outdoor activities as the air quality is expected to deteriorate throughout the day. The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday halted some flights bound for New York’s LaGuardia Airport due to the smoke. Visibility was also causing delays at Newark Liberty International Airport.
Smoke from the Canadian wildfires blankets New York City affecting air quality on June 7th, 2023.
Leslie Josephs | CNBC
City officials have advised residents to limit outdoor activity Wednesday and warned that children, older adults and people with preexisting respiratory problems are especially vulnerable.
Wildfire smoke releases fine particulate matter, called PM2.5, which enters the lungs and causes health issues such as asthma and bronchitis. PM2.5 concentration in New York City is currently 15 times the World Health Organization’s annual air quality guideline value.
In this GOES-16 GeoColor satellite image taken Monday, June 5, 2023 at 7 p.m. EDT and provided by CIRA/NOAA, smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec, Canada, top center, drifts southward.
NOAA | AP
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has issued an Air Quality Health Advisory for all five boroughs. City officials have said they expect the advisory to remain in place for the next few days but added it’s particularly difficult to forecast smoke conditions.
Mayor Eric Adams in a press briefing Wednesday urged vulnerable residents to remain indoors and said dangerous air quality conditions are forecast to temporarily improve later tonight through Thursday morning but continue to deteriorate Thursday afternoon and evening.
“This may be the first time we’ve experienced something like this of this magnitude,” Adams said. “Climate change is accelerating these conditions. We must continue to draw down emissions and improve air quality and build resiliency.”
Heavy smoke fills the air as people cross 34th Street in Herald Square, Manhattan, New York, June 6, 2023.
Gary Hershorn | Corbis News | Getty Images
Canada is on track to experience its worst-ever wildfire season, with more than 400 active wildfires currently burning across nearly all Canadian provinces and territories. Federal officials said last week that wildfires have burned more than 6.7 million acres and about 26,000 people are under evacuation orders.
The smoke from Canada’s wildfires has drifted south and prompted air pollution warnings across the country.
A man sits at the bus stop with a mask on his face in New York City, June 6, 2023.
Selcuk Acar | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Millions of people in the Midwest are experiencing dangerous air quality conditions, with air quality advisories in effect in southeastern Minnesota, parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and areas in Wisconsin. Air quality alerts have also been posted across most of New England.
The National Weather Service in a forecast said the smoke was expected to linger through Wednesday and continue to travel further west.
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of global wildfires and air pollution from wildfire smoke is also growing worse. Last year, Stanford researchers found millions of Americans are routinely exposed to wildfire smoke pollution at levels rarely seen only a decade ago.
Smoke from the Canadian wildfires blankets New York City affecting air quality on June 7th, 2023.
A view of the drought that affected the Los Bermejales reservoir which is at 18% of its capacity in Arenas del Rey in Granada, Spain, on May 13, 2023.
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
European policymakers are battling to get to grips with a growing water crisis ahead of what researchers fear could be yet another climate crisis-fueled summer of drought.
Reservoirs in Mediterranean countries like Italy have fallen to water levels typically associated with summer heatwaves in recent weeks, threatening agricultural production, while protests have broken out over water shortages in both France and Spain.
It comes as temperatures are poised to climb through summer and many fear Europe’s already “very precarious” water problem could get even worse.
Satellite data analyzed by researchers from Austria’s University of Graz at the start of the year found that drought was impacting Europe on a much larger scale than researchers had previously expected.
The study was published after European Union researchers found that Europe experienced its hottest summer ever last year, with the intense drought thought to be the worst the region had seen in at least 500 years.
Researchers at the University of Graz said Europe had been suffering from a severe drought since 2018, with the effects becoming clear last year as receding waters wreaked havoc for food and energy production, while numerous aquatic species lost their habitats.
“A few years ago, I would never have imagined that water would be a problem here in Europe, especially in Germany or Austria,” said Torsten Mayer-Gürr, a lead author of the satellite study.
“We are actually getting problems with the water supply here — we have to think about this.”
In Spain, which saw temperatures climb to nearly 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in April, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned in the same month that drought in the southern European country had become one of its leading long-term concerns.
“The government of Spain and I are aware that the debate surrounding drought is going to be one of the central political and territorial debates of our country over the coming years,” Sanchez told Parliament, according to The Associated Press.
Last month, Spain’s government approved a 2.2 billion euro ($2.4 billion) package in an attempt to alleviate the impact of drought that has hit its agricultural sector.
A farmer displays a water pot as she talks in a microphone about drought during a demonstration of farmers to draw attention on rural living conditions and to claim the importance of agriculture in the society and its contribution to the country’s economy, in Madrid on May 13, 2023.
Oscar Del Pozo | Afp | Getty Images
Meanwhile, the European Drought Observatory warned in a special snapshot report earlier this year that conditions in late winter were similar to those seen last year, when high temperatures and a lack of precipitation resulted in a widespread and protracted drought that affected much of the continent.
The latest available data shows warning conditions for drought for more than a quarter of the EU’s 27-nation bloc, while 8% of the region is in a state of drought alert.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said the outlook this summer for large parts of Europe “doesn’t look as scary as it did a month ago.”
That’s because, amid an especially variable spring which saw record-breaking April temperatures in Spain and Portugal and devastating flash floods in Italy, heavy rain across southern Europe in recent weeks has helped to top up reservoirs and improve soil moisture.
However, Burgess said large parts of northern Europe and countries including Spain, France and Portugal in the south were still looking “fairly dry” at a time when some researchers fear Europe could be on track for another brutal summer.
“For water security across Europe, we really need to change how we treat water — and I think that the events of the last year were really a wake-up call for many European decision makers,” Burgess told CNBC via telephone.
Cedric Sabate, arborist, thins his trees to help them withstand the water restrictions in Thuir, near Perpignan, southern France, on May 16, 2023.
Raymond Roig | Afp | Getty Images
A spokesperson for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, did not respond to a CNBC request for comment.
Chloe Brimicombe, a climate researcher at Austria’s University of Graz, said water scarcity was a particularly acute problem in southern Europe.
“But I do think that central and Western Europe are less prepared — and in the coming years it has the potential to hit them in a way that they really aren’t expecting,” Brimicombe told CNBC via telephone.
“Europe needs to realize that climate change is affecting them,” she continued.
“They quite like to think that climate change is affecting the global south and that’s it. And, of course, it is affecting those people a lot more, but it is also affecting Europe. Not only do they need to help the global south, but they also need to help themselves at home too — and that means stronger mitigation and adaptation measures.”
Demand for lithium, a key component for electric vehicle batteries, is expected to surge, from 500,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate in 2021 to three to four million metric tons in less than a decade, according to McKinsey & Company.
Albemarle, the world’s top producer of this critical metal and the operator of mines in Australia, Chile and the U.S., says it plans to bring another domestic lithium mine online by 2027 — Kings Mountain in North Carolina. It already operates Silver Peak in Nevada.
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Albemarle is also building a $1.3 billion processing facility in South Carolina, where it will process battery-grade lithium hydroxide. The plant will support the manufacturing of 2.4 million electric vehicles annually and be able to process lithium from recycled batteries.
Despite that growth, Albemarle faces a number of potential headwinds including a possible economic downturn that could slow the demand for EVs, new battery chemistries that could reduce the need for lithium, battery recycling and additional competitors. Tesla began construction of a lithium refinery in Texas in 2023.
To better understand how lithium, known as “White Gold,” is extracted, the challenges involved and where production is moving to next, CNBC got a behind-the-scenes look at Albemarle’s operations in Chile and the U.S.
Aerial views of new homes under construction in the Pinal County, AZ town of Florence Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022.
Brian Van Der Brug | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
Arizona will not allow new housing construction in the Phoenix area that depends on groundwater, a decision that comes as the state grapples with a multi-decade drought and diminishing water supplies.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, during a news briefing Thursday, announced the restrictions that could impact the quickly expanding suburbs around Phoenix. The decision by the Arizona Department of Water Resources applies only to groundwater supplies and would not affect current homeowners who already have an assured water source.
A megadrought has generated the driest two decades in the West in at least 1,200 years, and human-caused climate change has helped to fuel the conditions. Water sources are declining across the U.S. West and restrictions on the Colorado River are impacting all sectors of the economy, including construction.
Earlier this year, Arizona projected that developers planning to build homes in the desert west of Phoenix don’t have enough groundwater supplies to execute those plans.
A more recent analysis found that roughly 4% of the area’s demand for groundwater, nearly 4.9 million acre-feet, would not be met over the next 100 years. An acre-foot of water is about what two average households consume per year.
The decision would allow developers to continue to build in the affected areas but would require them to find alternatives to groundwater supplies. During a nationwide housing shortage, developers are hoping to build homes in growing metropolitan regions such as Phoenix despite water shortages.
Arizona developers have said they can work around dwindling water supplies, pointing to technology such as low flow fixtures, drip irrigation and desert landscaping. The state’s restriction could also prompt developers to seek out other water sources, such as purchasing access to river water from farmers.
Despite the restriction, the governor said Arizona isn’t running out of water and is equipped to manage the situation.
“My message to Arizonans is this: we are not out of water and we will not be running out of water because, as we have done so many times before, we will tackle the water challenges we face with integrity and transparency,” Hobbs said.
The announcement comes as Arizona experiences disappearing groundwater as well as diminishing levels from the drought-stricken Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 40 million people in the U.S. The state receives roughly 2.8 million acre-feet per year, or about 18% of the total allocation, from the Colorado River.
Last month, Arizona struck a deal with California and Nevada to voluntarily reduce their water usage from the river in exchange for federal funding. Arizona has endured two rounds of mandatory water cuts from the river over the past two years.
Correction: A more recent analysis found that roughly 4% of the area’s demand for groundwater, nearly 4.9 million acre-feet, would not be met over the next 100 years. An earlier version misstated the timing.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund was established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of the country’s oil and gas sector.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund says it is prepared to start dropping companies for mismanaging climate risk starting next year, adding to the decarbonization pressure that activist shareholders are already piling on firms.
It comes shortly after the world’s the biggest investment fund said it would vote for shareholder proposals at Chevron and Exxon Mobil‘s respective annual meetings on Wednesday.
The resolutions seek to compel the U.S. oil majors to align their climate targets with the landmark Paris Agreement and commit to absolute carbon emission cuts by 2030.
Norway’s oil fund had refused to back similar shareholder proposals tabled in recent weeks at European oil majors, such as BP and TotalEnergies.
The fund says it assesses every shareholder proposal individually and notes there are differences between how European and U.S. oil majors tackle the Scope 3 emissions generated by customers’ use of their oil and gas.
“We are a particularly active owner when it comes to climate,” Carine Smith Ihenacho, chief governance and compliance officer at Norges Bank Investment Management, told CNBC via telephone.
Established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of Norway’s oil and gas sector, the fund said last year that it would take a tougher line on companies that failed to adopt credible climate plans.
It may come to a point where we feel the company is absolutely not listening to us, they are not reporting anything, we see no changes, we may then sell out.
Carine Smith Ihenacho
Chief governance and compliance officer at Norges Bank Investment Management
“We clearly said it is in our long-term interest that the companies in our portfolio will get to net zero by 2050 because, for our financial returns in the long term, we think that will be beneficial,” Ihenacho said, reflecting on the fund’s 2025 climate action plan.
“As an active owner, we really want to influence and push the companies towards setting net-zero 2050 targets and also push them towards having credible transition plans. By that, we mean science-based transition plans,” she added.
Norway’s oil fund has invested in more than 9,000 companies in 70 countries around the world and acknowledges that “companies care how we vote at AGMs.”
Ihenacho said that the main tools the fund seeks to use when engaging with corporate directors on environmental, social and governance factors are dialogue and voting, but added that the fund could soon be forced to consider selling out of climate laggards.
“It is something we have to balance the whole time,” Ihenacho said. “I think our starting point is very much that we want to be an owner and want to influence the companies. Selling out is not going to solve the climate crisis at all. You just sell to somebody else who may care less about climate as an owner than we do.”
“Having said that, it may come to a point where we feel the company is absolutely not listening to us, they are not reporting anything, we see no changes, we may then sell out. We may decide to sell out,” Ihenacho said.
“The earliest there will be any companies either on an observation list or excluded will be next year or maybe the year after that. We will try to use our ownership tools first,” she added.
Protesters outside the Salle Pleyel venue in Paris could be heard chanting “all we want is to knock down Total” and “one, two, three degrees, we have Total to thank.”
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
It comes amid a sense of palpable frustration among climate activists during the proxy voting season, with demonstrations taking place both inside and outside the AGM venues of oil giants.
Burning fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal, is the chief driver of the climate emergency.
Dutch group Follow This, a small activist investor and campaign group, has tabled resolutions at several Big Oil companies in recent weeks calling for faster green transition plans.
A rebellion of 30% voted in favor of a resolution at TotalEnergies’ AGM last week, reflecting a significant rebuke by the typical standards of annual shareholder meetings.
By comparison, support for a similar resolution at BP’s AGM last month came in at just 17%, up from 15% last year, while backing for a climate resolution tabled at Shell‘s annual meeting last week came in at 20%, or the same level as in 2022.
Chevron and Exxon Mobil have urged shareholders to reject the shareholder proposals put forward by Follow This at their respective annual meetings.
Housing markets are undergoing a fundamental shift because of higher mortgage rates and as global central banks keep up the inflation fight by hiking interest rates. Against this backdrop, some — including a ‘Big Short’ investor — fear the real estate sector is overlooking a systemic issue: flood risk.
A ‘Big Short’ investor fears an often-overlooked climate risk could see history repeating itself in the housing market.
Dave Burt, CEO of investment research firm DeltaTerra Capital, was one of the few skeptics who recognized the real estate sector was teetering on the brink of collapse in 2007.
He helped two of the protagonists of Michael Lewis’ bestselling book “The Big Short” bet against the mortgage market in the lead-up to the 2008 economic collapse. As it turned out, they were right and made millions.
Now, Burt believes the mortgage market is underestimating another systemic issue: flood risk. If realized, he warns the fallout could resemble the massive correction seen during the global financial crisis.
“Ultimately, until people have good information about what these climate-related costs are going to look like, we’re creating new problems every day. I think that’s really the crux of the matter,” Burt told CNBC.
So, why does the U.S. housing market seem to be underestimating the cost of flooding? What does this mean for homeowners and homebuyers in the U.K. and around the world? And what can be done to mitigate this risk?
A private wild land firefighter monitors a backfire along Old Lawley Toll Road during the Glass Fire in Calistoga, California, U.S., October 2, 2020. Picture taken October 2, 2020.
Stephen Lam | Reuters
State Farm General Insurance Company on Friday announced that it will stop accepting new homeowners insurance applications in California, citing “rapidly growing” catastrophe risks like wildfires, “historic increases” in construction costs and a challenging reinsurance market.
“We take seriously our responsibility to manage risk,” the company said in a release.
State Farm said it will stop accepting new business, personal lines property and casualty insurance applications starting Saturday. The new policy will not impact personal auto insurance, according to the release. State Farm’s independent contractor agents will also continue to serve existing customers.
The company said it will work with the California Department of Insurance and other policymakers to improve conditions in California, but that State Farm decided to take action to improve its “financial strength.
“We will continue to evaluate our approach based on changing market conditions,” State Farm said.
State Farm did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Heavy electrical transmission lines at the powerful Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, located in California’s Mojave Desert at the base of Clark Mountain and just south of this stateline community on Interstate 15, are viewed on July 15, 2022 near Primm, Nevada. The Ivanpah system consists of three solar thermal power plants and 173,500 heliostats (mirrors) on 3,500 acres and features a gross capacity of 392 megawatts (MW).
George Rose | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management this week said it has advanced two transmission projects proposed by public utility NV Energy that would facilitate more renewable energy development and delivery in Nevada.
The agency will start an environmental review for the Greenlink North project, which will span over 450 miles to connect Las Vegas to Reno, and release a draft environmental impact statement for the Greenlink West transmission project, which will cover 232 miles from Ely to Yerington.
Once completed, the projects will connect eight gigawatts of clean energy to the Western power grid. The plans would bolster the Biden administration’s goal to deploy 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands and waters by 2025 and achieve a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
The announcement comes as Congress debates federal energy permitting overhauls, with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introducing a measure earlier this month to speed permitting of both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects.
Transmission projects involve expanding high-voltage lines that transport renewable energy to populated areas and will play a critical role in accelerating the clean energy transition while meeting growing power demand.
The BLM aims to finalize proposed documents and develop a record of decision for the Greenlink West project by late 2024. It will also release draft environmental planning documents for the Greenlink North project for public comment later this year.
“Our public lands have a critical role to play in the clean energy transition,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement.
The agency said it has approved 35 clean energy projects over the past couple of years, including solar, geothermal, and gen-tie installations, which are anticipated to generate 8,160 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power more than 2.6 million homes.
Some projects include the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project in New Mexico and construction approval for California’s Sunlight Storage II Battery Storage System. The agency is also reviewing projects like Utah’s Star Range Solar Project and Nevada’s Bonanza Solar Project.
Climate activists protest outside the Shell annual general meeting at the ExCel center in London, U.K., on Tuesday, May 23, 2023. The protests come as Shell faces a shareholder vote on a measure to increase its climate ambitions following a year of record profits at the company.
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LONDON — Shell Chief Executive Wael Sawan and the firm’s board of directors on Tuesday were shielded by security staff as climate protesters unsuccessfully tried to storm the stage at the British oil giant’s annual shareholders meeting.
The acrimonious meeting, which was held at the ExCeL London exhibition center, was repeatedly disrupted by protesters before they were removed by security staff.
Proceedings were scheduled to get underway at 10 a.m. London time but waves of disruption delayed the meeting for well over an hour.
Protesters could be heard singing to the tune of “Hit the Road Jack,” “Go to hell, Shell, and don’t you come back no more” as Sawan, Chairman Andrew Mackenzie and other directors looked on.
It comes as climate-focused investors seek to ramp up pressure on the energy major after an extraordinary run of record profits.
Follow This, a small Dutch activist investor and campaign group with stakes in several Big Oil companies, tabled a resolution at Shell’s shareholder meeting.
Climate Resolution 26 calls on Shell to align its climate targets with the landmark Paris Agreement and commit to absolute carbon emissions cuts by 2030. These cuts, Follow This says, should include emissions generated by customers’ use of their oil and gas, known as Scope 3 emissions.
It echoes a 2021 ruling by a Dutch court that Shell should reduce its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of the decade, which the company has appealed.
For the first time, Dutch pension managers MN and PGGM — both Shell shareholders — have endorsed the resolution. The institutional investors lead engagement with Shell on behalf of the world’s largest climate-focused investor group Climate Action 100+, which represents $68 trillion in assets.
It comes as investors increasingly see a warming planet as a growing risk to their portfolios. The burning of fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal, is the chief driver of the climate crisis.
Shell reported adjusted earnings of $39.9 billion for the full-year 2022.
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Meanwhile, the Church of England Pensions Board, Britain’s Local Authorities Pensions Funds Forum, the the U.K.’s National Employment Savings Trust, and shareholder adviser PIRC have said they will either vote against or recommend a vote against the re-appointment of Shell’s Mackenzie.
Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer at the Church of England Pensions Board, reportedly said earlier this month that it had “lost confidence in the direction of the company.”
Shell, which is aiming to become a net-zero emissions business by 2050, has recommended shareholders vote against the motion tabled by Follow This. The company described Climate Resolution 26 as “unclear, generic and would create confusion as to Board and shareholder accountabilities.”
“We strongly disagree with the Follow This resolution and with those organisations which have recommended supporting it, or voting against Board members. There must be an emphasis on changing the use of energy as much as its supply, and this is reflected in our approach,” a spokesperson for Shell said in a statement.
“We will continue to invest in producing the energy the world needs today and for the foreseeable future. All of our investments have to provide a rate of return that our investors demand,” they added.
Proxy advisors Glass Lewis and ISS have both recommended that their clients vote against Resolution 26.
Follow This said it represents nearly 10,000 Shell shareholders, although the majority hold only a couple of shares.
It is unlikely that those planning to vote in favor of the resolution will trigger a broader shareholder revolt or succeed in ousting board members, but Follow This says it hopes investors take the opportunity to compel the company to align their 2030 emissions reduction targets with the Paris accord.
At BP‘s annual general meeting last month, support for a Follow This resolution calling for tougher emission reduction targets by the end of the decade came in at 17%, although this was up from 15% last year.
Big Oil posted bumper profits last year, bolstered by soaring fossil fuel prices and robust demand following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
For its part, Shell reported its highest-ever annual profit of nearly $40 billion in 2022. That comfortably surpassed the $28.4 billion in 2008 which Shell said was its previous annual record and was more than double the firm’s full-year 2021 profit of $19.29 billion.
Earlier this month, Shell posted adjusted earnings of $9.6 billion for the first three months of 2023.
The record profits were seen from within the industry as something of a vindication. Oil and gas giants came under immense pressure from shareholders and activists to invest in clean energy as oil demand cratered in the peak of 2020 Covid lockdowns.
The push toward green reform lost momentum last year, however, alarming investors and campaigners as the world’s leading climate scientists warned of “a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”
After ultimately failing with several climate resolutions in 2022, Follow This’ Mark van Baal told CNBC earlier this year that it was clear from discussions with oil majors that they were determined to fend off activist and shareholder pressure and continue with their core oil and gas businesses.
Kocho, a food produced using enset, served with honey and red pepper sauce.
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Earlier this year, shoppers in the U.K. faced a shortage of fresh fruit and vegetables, with some of the country’s grocery stores rationing produce like tomatoes, lettuce and peppers.
The reasons behind the scarcity of ingredients crucial to a tasty salad were complicated and varied, ranging from high energy prices to adverse weather conditions in supplier countries.
While the shortage has more or less abated, it did highlight the fragile nature of our food system and the huge importance of food security.
In 2022, a major report from the United Nations showed the scale of the problem.
“Between 702 and 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021,” The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report said.
The U.N.’s report flagged the “major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition: conflict, climate extremes and economic shocks, combined with growing inequalities.”
With concerns about the effects of climate change on the agriculture sector mounting, what we grow and eat could be on the cusp of a significant shift.
Crops unfamiliar to many of us could have a crucial role to play in the years ahead. In June 2022, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, listed several sources of food that could play a big role in future diets.
They include seaweed; cacti like the prickly pear; a type of wild coffee able to cope with far warmer temperatures than Arabica coffee; and enset, also known as the false banana.
“Enset is a relative of the banana,” James Borrell, research leader in Trait Diversity and Function at RBG Kew, told CNBC.
“But whereas a banana is from Southeast Asia and you eat the fruit, enset is from Africa and has been domesticated — and is only cultivated — in Ethiopia,” he added.
“You actually eat the whole trunk, or pseudo stem, and the underground corm.”
“Something like 15 plants could feed a person for a year, so it’s … very large, and it’s very productive.”
The enset plant in Ethiopia. Enset is also known as “the tree against hunger.”
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When it comes to food security, the potential of enset — which is also referred to as “the tree against hunger” — appears to be considerable.
Borrell told CNBC that it possesses a combination of traits and characteristics “very unusual in crops.”
“Firstly, it’s perennial, and so it keeps growing each year if you don’t harvest it,” he said.
A fruit tree may also be perennial, he noted, “but it only produces its fruit at a certain time of year — so you either need to consume it then or you need to store it.”
With enset, however, “you eat the whole thing … so the fact that it gets larger each year, you can simply harvest it when you need it.”
That, Borrell said, makes it particularly useful for subsistence farmers working on several crops.
“If some year your other crops fail, or they don’t have a sufficient yield, you can eat a little bit more of your enset,” he said.
“If you have a good year for your other crops, you can eat a bit less of your enset.” That means enset could “buffer seasonal food insecurity.”
“For a subsistence farmer, that’s an amazing product,” he added.
“It’s like a bank account of food, it’s like a green asset that you can maintain and nurture and if you don’t use it, it keeps accumulating.”
At the moment, RGB Kew saysenset supplies food to 20 million people in Ethiopia, but the organization adds it “could be a climate-smart crop for the future” thanks to its “high yield and resilience to long periods of drought.”
In late 2021, researchers based in the U.K. and Ethiopia, including Borrell, published a paper in Environmental Research which provided a tantalizing glimpse of the role it might play in the future.
“We find that despite a highly restricted current distribution, there is significant potential for climate-resilient enset expansion both within Ethiopia and across eastern and southern Africa,” the authors said.
Kocho, produced using the enset plant, photographed in Ethiopia.
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Could, then, the cultivation of enset extend from Ethiopia to other parts of the world, buffering other crops in the process?
“The very important caveat is that it is an Ethiopian crop,” Borrell said.
“And so those kinds of decisions are entirely up to Ethiopia … it’s Ethiopia’s indigenous knowledge, and it’s Ethiopia’s farmers that have spent thousands of years domesticating it.”
“So although we can talk about what is the potential and would it work, it’s very specifically not up to us to say whether it should happen and if it can happen.”
It’s unlikely, then, that people outside of Ethiopia will be seeing enset on their plate anytime soon.
Nevertheless, its resilience and importance in shoring up supply for farmers there illustrate how practices rooted in tradition may have a big role to play in the way we think about and consume food.
“It’s an amazing crop, with amazing indigenous knowledge underlying it,” Borrell said.
“I think the message is that this is just one of hundreds or even thousands of underutilized crops that are not particularly extensively researched, and they’re not widely known.”
“So for every plant we talk about, like enset, there’s many others that could have … particular combinations of traits that could help us address a challenge that we face.”
One of the boat ramps at Callville Bay Marina no longer reaches the water on April 16, 2023 in Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada.
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The Biden administration on Monday announced that it’s reached an agreement with states reliant on the Colorado River to reduce their water usage temporarily in exchange for at least $1 billion in federal funding, a deal that comes after months of negotiations and some missed deadlines to protect the drought-stricken river.
Under the agreement, California, Arizona and Nevada will voluntarily conserve 3 million acre-feet of water until 2026, amounting to about 13% of those states’ total allocation from the river. The Biden administration will compensate cities, water districts, Native American tribes and farm operators for 2.3 million acre-feet of savings using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. (An acre-foot of water is about what two average households consume per year.)
The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people and roughly 5.5 million acres of farmland in seven U.S. states. But a combination of prolonged drought, dwindling reservoir levels and increased demand have strained the river. The river’s major reservoirs, including Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have experienced dramatic declines in water levels.
“This is an important step forward towards our shared goal of forging a sustainable path for the basin that millions of people call home,” Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said.
California has the largest allocation of Colorado River water, with roughly 4.4 million acre-feet each year, comprising about 29% of the total allocation. Arizona receives roughly 2.8 million acre-feet per year, or about 18% of total allocation. Nevada’s allocation is approximately 300,000 acre-feet each year, representing around 2% of the total allocation.
The temporary agreement will avoid a situation where the federal government imposes unilateral water cuts on all seven states.
The administration on Monday also agreed to withdraw its environmental analysis from last month that would have required states to cut nearly 2.1 million additional acre-feet of their water usage in 2024. Today’s plan will be finalized after the Interior Department conducts an environmental review.
“Today’s announcement is a testament to the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to working with states, Tribes and communities throughout the West to find consensus solutions in the face of climate change and sustained drought,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
In January, after negotiations reached another standstill, six states submitted a proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation that outlined ways to cut water use, factoring in water that’s lost because of evaporation and leaky infrastructure. California released its own plan.
The Biden administration has previously urged all seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — to save between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water, or up to a third of the river’s average flow.
Photo taken on March 13, 2023 shows the Colorado River near Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border, the United States. The Colorado River, the parched lifeline in U.S. southwest, which supplies water to some 40 million people in seven states, got a jolt in the arm from the 2022-23 winter thanks to the snowpack that is melting and swelling streams and rivers.
Starting next week, the first of 8,000 Amazon employees will begin moving into one of two brand new 22-story towers in Arlington, Virginia. Move-in is expected to be complete by the end of the summer. Amazon’s HQ2, formally called Metropolitan Park, has many features that contribute toward the company’s goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions across all operations by 2040.
The buildings will run with no operational carbon emissions and will be powered by 100% renewable energy from a nearby solar farm.
“We eliminated fossil fuels from this building, which is huge and really new for a lot of developments, particularly of this size,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide sustainability.
The 2.1 million square feet of space includes some of the newest clean energy technology and sustainability features. An enormous meeting room has a mass timber ceiling made from 70-foot laminated planks of sustainable material. The floor is made of concrete from Carbon Cure, a clean cement company funded by Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.
A meeting room at Amazon’s HQ2
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There are 3,000 tinted glass windows for cooling, and red/green lights by the side of the windows that tell workers when is a good time to open those windows. The building is also using special cooling technology that helps save about 7 and a half million gallons of water per year. That’s more water than is needed to fill the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
The heating and cooling systems operate based on need, meaning the ventilation and temperatures will change depending on occupancy. There are also advanced energy metering systems in the building to help evaluate future improvements as the building is occupied and teams use the space.
“I think it’s incredibly important for a company like Amazon to demonstrate leadership and sustainability and to be out there to talk about where we’re testing and trialing things, to also send demand signals to the market that these are products and services that we want,” said Hurst. “We want to see the innovation in building materials. We want to see the innovation in construction equipment. We want to see it in how we’re incorporating that and we want that to go at scale, one for cost parity, but also for availability for everyone.”
Hurst wouldn’t say how much the sustainability features increased the cost of the development. Amazon officials said only that some things were found to be cost-neutral, like the low-carbon concrete.
“Other choices were about long term value like our water conservation measures. Sustainability also goes beyond utility cost savings decisions,” the officials said.
The Development was designed in heavy consultation with the surrounding community. The dog parks and a childcare center in the complex are open to surrounding residents. There is also a rooftop vegetable garden on the new tower now opening that is not for employees — the food produced instead will be distributed to local community organizations through non-profits.
However, there are still plenty of amenities for the 8,000 employees, who Hurst says will be in the office at least three days a week.
“We’re still committed to all the hiring goals that we set out. So we’ll continue on that path but really over the next decade,” said Hurst.
As for the second phase of HQ2 offices that was recently delayed, Hurst wouldn’t give a time frame but said Amazon is in the pre-construction phase and still committed to it.
Cars, trucks, SUVs, and other vehicles drive in traffic on the 405 freeway through the Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles, California, on August 25, 2022.
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DETROIT — The average age of passenger vehicles on U.S. roadways climbed to a record this year, as car owners hold on to their vehicles longer amid low supplies of new vehicles and sky-high prices.
The average age of a light-duty vehicle on U.S. roads rose by more than three months — the highest year-over-year increase since the Great Recession in 2008-2009 — to 12.5 years as of Jan. 1, according to a new report Monday from S&P Global Mobility. That includes a 3.8% increase for passenger cars to 13.6 years and a 1.7% uptick in trucks, SUVs and crossovers to 11.8 years.
Rising vehicle ages are good news for aftermarket parts suppliers like AutoZone, O’Reilly Automotive and Advance Auto Parts. It also can benefit dealer service centers, but it doesn’t bode well for new vehicle dealers and sales.
“The aftermarket and the repair market as a whole is definitely a winner as the average age continues to grow,” said Todd Campau, associate director of aftermarket solutions for S&P Global Mobility. “The more older vehicles that are on the road, the more repairs they need.”
In total, S&P Global Mobility reports there are more than 284 million vehicles in operation on U.S. roads. That’s up slightly from 283 million last year.
S&P reports the average vehicle age last year experienced upward pressure initially due to supply constraints that caused low levels of new vehicle inventory, and then by slowing demand as rising interest rates and inflation reduced consumer demand in the second half of the year.
New and used vehicle prices have been elevated since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as the global health crisis combined with supply chain issues caused production of new vehicles to sporadically idle. The costs and scarcity of inventory led consumers to buy more used vehicles, increasing those prices as well.
In addition, the Federal Reserve’s moves to raise interest rates 10 times since March 2022 have not assisted new vehicle sales.
Cox Automotive reports the average listed price of a used vehicle was $26,799 in April — the highest price point this year. The average transaction price for a new vehicle was $48,275 in April, up 3.7%, or $1,744, from a year earlier.
Part of the pricing increase is due to the vehicle mix, swinging away from passenger cars to utility vehicles.
The number of passenger cars on the road will fall below 100 million for the first time since 1978, according to S&P, as U.S. consumers demand larger vehicles that automakers are happily building at higher profit margins.
“Pickup trucks have stayed healthy. … They’ve stayed pretty consistent,” Campau said. “The real driver here is the crossover utility vehicle that really has displaced the passenger car for most families.”
In 2022, S&P reports 78% of all new vehicles registered in the U.S. last year were crossovers, trucks or SUVs.
Battery electric vehicles, or BEVs, is another growing subsegment of new vehicles. S&P reports new BEV registrations jumped 58% year over year, to nearly 758,000 units in 2022.
Of the nearly 2.3 million BEVs registered in the U.S. from 2013 to 2022, S&P reports about 2.12 million are still on the road today. That equates to an average age of 3.6 years for active vehicles.
The increase in EVs comes as automakers spend billions of dollars to increase the number of new all-electric cars and trucks amid tightening government emissions regulations globally.
