Tag: energy and utilities

Accelerating the EV revolution whether you like it or not | CNN Politics

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The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a plan to remake the way car-obsessed Americans live, using public safety rules to accelerate the shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

Just a fraction of the current auto market is EVs, but under standards announced by the EPA Wednesday, up to two-thirds of new vehicles sold in the US would be zero-emission or plug-in hybrid within a decade.

The rules, which are not yet final, would use authority under the Clean Air Act to force auto companies to cut pollution and slash vehicle emissions by more than half. They would phase in with model year 2027 vehicles and be fully implemented by 2032. Read CNN’s full report.

While ambitious, the goals are not unprecedented. They put the federal government on track to catch up with state governments, led by California, that want to stop allowing the sale of internal combustion vehicles by 2035. Read this report from CNN Business about why that’s not as crazy as it seems.

There is a very big legal question mark looming behind California’s action and the EPA’s effort, which still has a public comment and revision period.

The current Supreme Court, dominated by conservative justices, has already shown its scorn for EPA rulemaking and its indifference to addressing climate change. Last year, the court nixed the Biden administration’s plan to curb emissions from existing power plants.

I asked CNN climate reporter Ella Nilsen for her takeaways from the EPA announcement. She offered these key points:

► The standards are ambitious, but doable

If enacted, the newly proposed EPA emissions standards would be one of the Biden administration’s most aggressive climate-change policies yet – moving the US auto market decisively toward electric vehicles in the next decade.

However, multiple experts said the standards are doable, and even lag slightly behind the California standards, which will completely phase out the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035 to usher in electric vehicles. The US is also following countries including the EU and China, which are moving more aggressively toward electric vehicles.

► Charging infrastructure and consumer incentives could be tricky

This new proposed rule won’t happen overnight; it would be gradually phased in over the next decade. At the same time, the US needs to build up a network of electric charging stations in addition to the ubiquitous gas station. Federal officials have also talked about needing to incentivize more Americans to buy EVs by bringing the cost down, with federal tax credits.

However, the new $7,500 tax credits (passed last year by Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act) are incredibly complex due to manufacturing requirements. The credits could actually shrink the eligible number of cars that qualify (however, leased vehicles have more leeway under the new system). Regardless, it will take years for the EV infrastructure, incentives and supply to fall into place to make electric vehicles available to most Americans.

► This is a big deal for US climate policy

This rule will impact the US economy, but it’s also major climate policy. The proposed EPA tailpipe standards would cut planet-warming pollution from US cars in half. Combined with the agency’s medium and heavy-duty vehicles standard, the proposals could cut nearly 10 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2055.

Given Americans’ reliance on cars, transportation is a big part of overall US emissions – it accounts for nearly 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the US, according to the EPA. Cutting down on tailpipe pollution from gas-powered cars and trucks is a big part of decarbonizing the US.

While the federal government and key states are all in on moving toward EVs, and auto companies are spending big to get competitive in the market, Americans generally are not yet completely embracing the idea.

Just 4% of Americans currently own an EV, and a scant 12% are seriously considering buying one, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. Less than half, 43%, say they would consider buying an EV in the future, and a sizable 41% are completely closed off to the idea.

The expected partisan breakdown applies to those figures. Most of the interest in EVs is among Democrats. Most of the staunch opposition is among Republicans. Younger Americans and those making $100,000 and above are also more interested in buying an EV in the future.

There are also key regional disparities. In the West, where states are already working to phase in EVs, only 28% say they would not buy an EV. Compare that to half of Southerners who would not consider buying an EV.

A majority of the country is skeptical that EVs will even have an effect on the climate, according to the poll, with 61% saying EVs will help address climate change only a little or not at all.

In a separate AP-NORC poll released this week, the most-cited major reasons for not wanting to purchase an EV – out of eight offered in the poll – were expense (60% said they cost too much) and convenience (50% said there aren’t enough charging stations available).

Access and affordability should be addressed as inventory increases, writes CNN’s Peter Valdes-Dapena, who covers the auto industry. A decade from now, charging should be quicker and easier, EV ranges should be longer and prices should be at or below the cost of an internal combustion vehicle. Read his full report.

Rather than fighting the rules, as the fossil fuel industry is sure to do, the auto industry is already investing heavily in EVs, responding to tougher regulation already imposed around the world and by California, which moved to ban the sale of new gas and diesel powered vehicles by 2035.

California actually took the lead on pushing for EVs in the years when the Trump administration was dialing back on federal climate policy. Other states, like Oregon, Washington and Minnesota, have tied their standards to California’s.

Valdes-Dapena notes that car companies with loyal customer bases are slowly making the switch. He writes:

Currently, Toyota offers only one electric model in the United States, the BZ4X SUV, but more are planned. Honda, another Japanese brand with a loyal following, offers no EVs currently but the company is gearing up factories in Ohio to build future EV models. Honda expects to offer its first EV next year. General Motors also has a number of EV models coming in the next year or two.

He also notes that GM has pledged to sell only electric passenger vehicles by 2035.

And no, this does not mean internal combustion vehicles will be banned. They will still make up the vast majority of vehicles on the road in a decade even if this rule is finalized and withstands challenges in court. But it would represent a tectonic shift.

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April 12, 2021
Fact check: Biden makes 5 false claims about guns, plus some about other subjects | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
—

President Joe Biden made false claims about a variety of topics, notably including gun policy, during a series of official speeches and campaign remarks over the last two weeks.

He made at least five false claims related to guns, a subject on which he has repeatedly been inaccurate during his presidency. He also made a false claim about the extent of his support from environmental groups. And he used incorrect figures about the population of Africa, his own travel history and how much renewable energy Texas uses.

Here is a fact check of these claims, plus a fact check on a Biden exaggeration about guns. The White House declined to comment on Tuesday.

Beau Biden and red flag laws

In a Friday speech at the National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut, Biden spoke of how a gun control law he signed in 2022 has provided federal funding for states to expand the use of gun control tools like “red flag” laws, which allow the courts to temporarily seize the guns of people who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. After mentioning red flag laws, Biden invoked his late son Beau Biden, who served as attorney general of Delaware, and said: “As my son was the first to enforce when he was attorney general.”

Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. Delaware did not have a red flag law when Beau Biden was state attorney general from 2007 to 2015. The legislation that created Delaware’s red flag program was named the Beau Biden Gun Violence Prevention Act, but it was passed in 2018, three years after Beau Biden died of brain cancer. (In 2013, Beau Biden had pushed for a similar bill, but it was rejected by the state Senate.) The president has previously said, correctly, that a Delaware red flag law was named after his son.

Delaware was far from the first state to enact a red flag law. Connecticut passed the first such state law in the country in 1999.

Stabilizing braces

In the same speech, the president spoke confusingly of his administration’s effort to make it more difficult for Americans to purchase stabilizing braces, devices that are attached to the rear of pistols, most commonly AR-15-style pistols, and make it easier to fire them one-handed.

“Put a pistol on a brace, and it…turns into a gun,” Biden said. “Makes them where you can have a higher-caliber weapon – a higher-caliber bullet – coming out of that gun. It’s essentially turning it into a short-barreled rifle, which has been a weapon of choice by a number of mass shooters.”

Facts First: Biden’s claims that a stabilizing brace turns a pistol into a gun and increases the caliber of a gun or bullet are false. A pistol is, obviously, already a gun, and “a pistol brace does not have any effect on the caliber of ammunition that a gun fires or anything about the basic functioning of the gun itself,” said Stephen Gutowski, a CNN contributor who is the founder of the gun policy and politics website The Reload.

Biden’s assertion that the addition of a stabilizing brace can “essentially” turn a pistol into a short-barreled rifle is subjective; it’s the same argument his administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has made in support of its attempt to subject the braces to new controls. The administration’s regulatory effort is being challenged in the courts by gun rights advocates.

Gun manufacturers and lawsuits

Repeating a claim he made in his 2022 State of the Union address and on other occasions, Biden said at a campaign fundraiser in California on Monday: “The only industry in America you can’t sue is the – is the gun manufacturers.”

Facts First: Biden’s claim is false, as CNN and other fact-checkers have previously noted. Gun manufacturers are not entirely exempt from being sued, nor are they the only industry with some liability protections. Notably, there are significant liability protections for vaccine manufacturers and, at present, for people and entities involved in making, distributing or administering Covid-19 countermeasures such as vaccines, tests and treatments.

Under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, gun manufacturers cannot be held liable for the use of their products in crimes. However, gun manufacturers can still be held liable for (and thus sued for) a range of things, including negligence, breach of contract regarding the purchase of a gun or certain damages from defects in the design of a gun.

In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit against gun manufacturer Remington Arms Co. to continue. The plaintiffs, a survivor and the families of nine other victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, wanted to hold the company – which manufactured the semi-automatic rifle that was used in the 2012 killing – partly responsible by targeting the company’s marketing practices, another area where gun manufacturers can be held liable. In 2022, those families reached a $73 million settlement with the company and its four insurers.

There are also more recent lawsuits against gun manufacturers. For example, the parents of some of the victims and survivors of the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, have sued over the marketing practices of the company that made the gun used by the killer. Another suit, filed by the government of Buffalo, New York, in December over gun violence in the city, alleges that the actions of several gun manufacturers and distributors have endangered public health and safety. It is unclear how those lawsuits will fare in the courts.

– Holmes Lybrand contributed to this item.

The NRA and lawsuits

At a campaign fundraiser in California on Tuesday, Biden said the National Rifle Association, the prominent gun rights advocacy organization, itself cannot be sued.

“And the fact that the NRA has such overwhelming power – you know, the NRA is the only outfit in the nation that we cannot sue as an institution,” Biden said. “They got – they – before this – I became president, they passed legislation saying you can’t sue them. Imagine had that been the case with tobacco companies.”

Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. While gun manufacturers have liability protections, no law was ever passed to forbid lawsuits against the NRA. The NRA has faced a variety of lawsuits in recent years.

Machine guns

At the same Tuesday fundraiser in California, Biden said that he taught the Second Amendment in law school, “And guess what? It doesn’t say that you can own any weapon you want. It says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own.” One example Biden cited was this: “You can’t own a machine gun.”

Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. The Second Amendment does not explicitly say people cannot own certain weapons – and the courts have not interpreted it to forbid machine guns. In fact, with some exceptions, people in more than two-thirds of states are allowed to own and buy fully automatic machine guns as long as those guns were legally registered and possessed prior to May 19, 1986, the day President Ronald Reagan signed a major gun law. There were more than 700,000 legally registered machine guns in the US as of May 2021, according to official federal data.

Federal law imposes significant national restrictions on machine gun purchases, and the fact that there is a limited pool of pre-May 19, 1986 machine guns means that buying these guns tends to be expensive – regularly into the tens of thousands of dollars. But for Americans in most of the country, Biden’s claim that you simply “can’t” own a machine gun, period, is not true.

“It’s not easy to obtain a fully automatic machine gun today, I don’t want to give that impression – but it is certainly legal. And it’s always been legal,” Gutowski said in March, when Biden previously made this claim about machine guns.

California, where Biden made this remark on Tuesday, has strict laws restricting machine guns, but there is a legal process even there to apply for a state permit to possess one.

The ‘boyfriend loophole’

In the Friday speech to the National Safer Communities Summit, Biden said “we fought like hell to close the so-called boyfriend loophole” that had allowed people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence to buy and possess guns if the victim was not someone they were married to, living with or had a child with. Biden then said that now “we finally can say that those convicted of domestic violence abuse against their girlfriend or boyfriend cannot buy a firearm, period.”

Facts First: Biden’s categorical claim that such offenders now “cannot buy a firearm, period” is an exaggeration, though Biden did sign a law in 2022 that made significant progress in closing the “boyfriend loophole.” That 2022 law added “dating” partners to the list of misdemeanor domestic violence offenders who are generally prohibited from gun purchases – but in a concession demanded by Republicans, the law says these offenders can buy a gun five years after their first conviction or completion of their sentence, whichever comes later, if they do not reoffend in the interim.

It’s also worth noting that the law’s new restriction on dating partners applies only to people who committed the domestic violence against a someone with whom they were in or “recently” had been in a “continuing” and “serious” romantic or intimate relationship. In other words, it omits people whose offense was against partners from their past or someone they dated casually.

Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said there are “definitely some gaps” in the law, “so it’s not a blanket end-all be-all,” but she said it is “really a step in the right direction.”

Biden said at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Saturday: “Let me just say one thing very seriously. You know, I think this is the first time – and I’ve been around, as I said, a while – in history where, last week, every single environmental organization endorsed me.”

Facts First: It’s not true that every single environmental organization had endorsed Biden. Four major environmental organizations did endorse him the week prior, the first time they had issued a joint endorsement, but other well-known environmental organizations have not yet endorsed in the presidential election.

The four groups that endorsed Biden together in mid-June were the Sierra Club, NextGen PAC, and the campaign arms of the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council. That is not a complete list of every single environmental group in the country. For example, Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, Earthjustice and Greenpeace, in addition to some lesser-known groups, have not issued presidential endorsements to date.

Biden’s claim of an endorsement from every environmental group comes amid frustration from some activists over his recent approvals of fossil fuel projects.

In official speeches last Tuesday and last Wednesday and at a press conference the week prior, Biden claimed that Africa’s population would soon reach 1 billion. “You know, soon – soon, Africa will have 1 billion people,” he said last Wednesday.

Facts First: This is false. Africa’s population exceeded 1 billion in 2009, according to United Nations figures; it is now more than 1.4 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa alone has a population of more than 1.1 billion.

At a campaign fundraiser in Connecticut on Friday, Biden spoke about reading recent news articles about the use of renewable energy sources in Texas. He said, “I think it’s 70% of all their energy produced by solar and wind because it is significantly cheaper. Cheaper. Cheaper.”

Facts First: Biden’s “70%” figure is not close to correct. The federal Energy Information Administration projected late last year that Texas would meet 37% of its electricity demand in 2023 with wind and solar power, up from 30% in 2022.

Texas has indeed been a leader in renewable energy, particularly wind power, but the state is far from getting more than two-thirds of its energy from wind and solar alone. The organization that provides electricity to 90% of the state has a web page where you can see its current energy mix in real time; when we looked on Wednesday afternoon, during a heat wave, the mix included 15.8% solar, 10.2% wind and 6.6% nuclear, while 67.1% was natural gas or coal and lignite.

In his Friday speech at the National Safer Communities Summit, Biden made a muddled claim about his past visits to Afghanistan and Iraq – saying that “you know, I spent a lot of time as president, and I spent 30-some times – visits – many more days in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Facts First: Biden’s claim that he has visited Afghanistan and Iraq “30-some times” is false – the latest in a long-running series of exaggerations about his visits to the two countries. His presidential campaign said in 2019 that he made 21 visits to these countries, but he has since continued to put the figure in the 30s. And he has not visited either country “as president.”

At another campaign fundraiser in California on Monday, Biden reprised a familiar claim about his travels with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is, like him, a former vice president.

“It wasn’t appropriate for Barack to be able to spend a lot of time getting to know him, so it was an assignment I was given. And I traveled 17,000 miles with him, usually one on one,” Biden said.

Facts First: Biden’s “17,000 miles” claim remains false. Biden has not traveled anywhere close to 17,000 miles with Xi, though they have indeed spent lots of time together. This is one of Biden’s most common false claims as president, a figure he has repeated over and over in speeches despite numerous fact checks.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted in 2021 that Biden and Xi often did not even travel parallel routes to their gatherings, let alone physically travel together. The only apparent way to get Biden’s mileage past 17,000, Kessler found, is to add the length of Biden’s flight journeys between Washington and Beijing, during which Xi was not with him.

A White House official told CNN in early 2021 that Biden was adding up his “total travel back and forth” for meetings with Xi. But that is very different than traveling “with him” as Biden keeps saying, especially in the context of his boasts about how well he knows Xi. Biden has had more than enough time to make his language more precise.

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April 12, 2021
Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies | CNN Business

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CNN
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Some Amazon corporate workers have announced plans to walk off the job next week over frustrations with the company’s return-to-work policies, among other issues, in a sign of heightened tensions inside the e-commerce giant after multiple rounds of layoffs.

The work stoppage is being jointly organized by an internal climate justice worker group and a remote work advocacy group, according to an email from organizers and public social media posts.

Workers participating have two main demands: asking the e-commerce giant to put climate impact at the forefront of its decision making, and to provide greater flexibility for how and where employees work.

The lunchtime walkout is scheduled for May 31, beginning at noon. Organizers have said in an internal pledge that they are only going to go through with the walkout if at least 1,000 workers agree to participate, according to an email from organizers.

The Washington Post was first to report the planned walkout.

The collective action from corporate workers comes after Amazon, like other Big Tech companies, cut tens of thousands of jobs beginning late last year amid broader economic uncertainty. All told, Amazon has said this year that it is laying off some 27,000 workers in multiple rounds of cuts.

At the same time, Amazon and other tech companies are trying to get workers into the office more. In February, Amazon said it was requiring thousands of its workers to be in the office for at least three days per week, starting on May 1.

“Morale is really at an all-time low right now,” an Amazon corporate worker based in Los Angeles, who plans on participating in the walkout next week, told CNN. “I think the hope from this walkout is really to send a clear message to leadership that we’re expecting real action from them on a number of issues, with the thesis of just, like, we need better long term decision-making that benefits not only employees but the communities that we serve.”

The worker, who asked not to be named, said organizers are focusing the in-person walkout efforts at the company’s Seattle headquarters but have also created a way for people to participate virtually so “all Amazonians are welcome to participate.”

One of the internal groups spearheading next week’s walkout is dubbed Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), the same coalition that organized protests slamming the company for inaction on climate change back in 2019.

“Amazon must keep pace with a changing world,” the group wrote in a Twitter thread Tuesday calling for the walkout next week. “To cultivate a diverse, world-class workplace, we need real plans to tackle our climate impact and flexible work options.”

Amazon’s Climate Pledge, signed in 2019, commits the company to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, among other climate goals. But in the Twitter thread, the group blasted the pledge as “hype” and demanded “a genuine climate plan.”

Amazon said it has made progress in meeting its goals, including by putting thousands of electric delivery vehicles on the road, and by continuing to invest in both proven and new science-backed solutions for reducing carbon emissions. Amazon also said it had the goal of powering 100% of its operations with renewable energy by 2030, and now expects to meet that goal by 2025.

“We respect our employees’ rights to express their opinions,” Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, told CNN in a statement Tuesday.

In response to employee concerns about the return to office, Munoz said the company has “had a great few weeks with more employees in the office.”

“There’s been good energy on campus and in urban cores like Seattle where we have a large presence. We’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices,” Munoz said. “As it pertains to the specific topics this group of employees is raising, we’ve explained our thinking in different forums over the past few months and will continue to do so.”

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April 12, 2021
AC is hard on the planet. This building has a sustainable solution | CNN Business

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New York
CNN
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In mid-July at the construction site at 1 Java Street in Brooklyn, New York, the outside temperatures can reach sweltering highs in the 90s. But 500-feet underground, it’s 55 degrees all year round.

That stable, underground temperature will be key to making life comfortable in the residential building that will soon sit on the site, a scenic spot in the Greenpoint neighborhood along Brooklyn’s waterfront.

With 834 rental apartments plus commercial space, 1 Java Street is set to be the largest multifamily, residential building with “geothermal” heating and cooling system in New York State — and potentially the country — when it’s completed in late 2025, according to developer Lendlease.

Geothermal technology is essentially a more eco-friendly version of an HVAC system, allowing the building spaces and water to be cooled and heated more efficiently, without traditional window AC units and natural gas. Lendlease says the technology will make it possible for the nearly 790,000-square foot building to release around 55% less carbon and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

With summer temperatures reaching record highs around the world, experts say finding ways to cool buildings that are less taxing on the environment could be crucial in fighting climate change. Even back in 2018, air conditioning and electric fans accounted for around 20% of total global electricity use, according to a report cpublished that year by the International Energy Agency. Now, energy and urban development experts are urging cities and developers to implement new solutions to keep buildings cooler. And both New York City and the Biden administration have identified geothermal systems as one way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Whenever we look at a site, we consider how we can make it more sustainable,” Layth Madi, Lendlease’s senior vice president and director of development, told CNN, adding that the development firm is aiming to reach net zero by 2025 and be fully decarbonized by 2040.

“I think many residents will choose to live in this building because of its green credentials,” Madi said. “We know a lot of people are thinking about climate change and our impact on the planet.”

Geothermal plumbing works by sending water from a building deep into the ground below it to take advantage of the earth’s naturally stable internal temperature — on hot days, the underground temperature will reduce the temperature of warm water from the building to help with cooling; on cold days, it will warm up cold water to help with heating.

At 1 Java Street, construction crews are drilling 320 holes, each around 4 inches in diameter and 499-feet deep, to create the building’s geothermal piping system through which the water will be pumped.

“Your thermostat turns on and it tells your building, ‘I need heating or cooling.’ And it energizes pumps, and those pumps flow fluid through the [geothermal] circuit that we’ve established here on site,” said Adam Alaica, director of engineering and development at Geosource Energy, the Canadian firm that’s installing and drilling the vertical geothermal piping at 1 Java Street.

For now, the process doesn’t come cheap. Installing the building’s geothermal system increased construction costs by around 6%, according to Madi, and required securing equipment and trained manpower that remains relatively scarce.

“We’re seeing rapid growth — I would say approaching that of exponential growth year over year in interest in the technology, which is very exciting for the industry as a whole,” Alacia said. “The bottlenecks to that growth have always been, and will continue to be in the years to come, specialty machinery to implement this infrastructure and the people resources it takes to do this.”

Eventually, though, as more developers invest in geothermal and more companies provide the specialty training needed to install the technology — Geosource operates its own training program — Madi said he expects the costs to come down. And once the building is up and running, it should be more cost efficient to heat and cool.

Lendlease didn’t specify whether residents of 1 Java Street will experience any cost savings on utilities thanks to the geothermal system (the units themselves will be priced at market rate, with 30% of them set aside as affordable housing). “Ultimately, it will be up to tenants to manage their power consumption and work with the utility company on billing,” the company told CNN.

While 1 Java Street will be one of relatively few geothermal buildings in the state, the companies behind its development say New York — and the world — could use more buildings like it.

“Geothermal is not a new technology … there’s kind of a primitive component to it, using the earth as a heat source and heat sink,” Alacia said. “In general, geothermal can really be used anywhere you have ground under your feet … The cost and the business case can vary, but technically it has strong credentials really anywhere in the country.”

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April 12, 2021
Biden announces new environmental justice initiatives | CNN Politics

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CNN
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President Joe Biden announced new environmental justice actions on Friday, including an executive order that the White House says will make environmental justice a central mission of federal agencies.

“Under this order, environmental justice will become the responsibility of every single federal agency – I mean, every single federal agency,” Biden pledged at a White House Rose Garden signing ceremony surrounded by climate and environmental justice advocates just before Earth Day.

He continued, “Every federal agency must take into account environmental health impacts on communities and work to prevent those negative impacts. Environmental justice will be the mission of the entire government woven directly into how we work with state, local, tribal, and territorial governments.”

The executive order, which will still be up to agencies to implement, will create a new Office of Environmental Justice inside the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Friday’s move comes as as many environmental justice groups have been frustrated at the administration’s recent approval of a major Alaska oil project. CNN also reported Friday that the Biden administration is planning to roll out aggressive new rules to regulate planet-warming pollution from natural gas power plants – a move that could face fierce legal challenges.

Friday’s move also took place as Biden is preparing to announce his reelection bid as soon as next week, CNN reported Thursday. During his last presidential campaign, he worked hard to court environmental justice activist groups.

Biden’s new order directs agencies to work more closely with impacted communities and improve “gaps” in scientific data to try to better tackle the impacts of pollution on people’s health, a White House official said. If toxic substances were released from a federal facility in the future, the order requires federal agencies to notify nearby communities.

The order comes a few years after Biden announced his signature “Justice40” initiative, vowing to direct 40% of federal climate and clean funding from new legislation to disadvantaged communities. On Friday, three additional agencies – the Department of Commerce, the National Science Foundation and NASA – will also join the initiative.

Biden also took a swipe at Republicans in his speech, contrasting his action on environmental justice with the GOP’s policies.

During his remarks on Friday, the president detailed how he’s spent much of his tenure in office surveying damage from extreme weather events, calling the threat of climate change “an existential threat to our nation” and criticizing congressional Republicans for attempting to block his legislative priorities focused on climate.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, recently unveiled provisions in his debt limit proposal that would overturn clean energy tax credits passed in the Inflation Reduction Act last year. The proposal also includes HR 1 – the GOP’s version of an energy permitting bill.

Republicans, Biden argued, would “rather threaten to default on the US economy, or get rid of some $30 billion in taxpayer subsidies … than getting rid of $30 billion in taxpayer subsidies to an oil industry that made $200 billion last year.”

“Imagine seeing all this happen – the wildfires, the storms, the floods – and doing nothing about it,” he continued. “Imagine taking all these clean energy jobs away from working class folks all across America. Imagine turning your back on all those moms and dads living in towns poisoned by pollution and telling them, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own.’ We can’t let that happen.”

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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April 12, 2021
US received intel from European ally that Ukrainian military was planning attack on Nord Stream pipelines, officials say | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The US received intelligence from a European ally last year that the Ukrainian military was planning an attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines three months before they were hit, three US officials told CNN.

The attack on the pipelines last September has been condemned by US officials and Western allies alike as a sabotage on critical infrastructure. It is currently being investigated by other European nations.

The intelligence assessment was first disclosed by The Washington Post, which obtained the document from a trove of classified documents allegedly leaked on the social media platform Discord by Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira.

CNN has not seen the document but the three officials confirmed the US was told about the Ukrainian plans.

According to the Washington Post, the intelligence cited a source in Ukraine which said Western allies “had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage” for almost a year. The intelligence said that those who may have been responsible were reporting directly to Ukraine’s commander in chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “who was put in charge so that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation,” the Post reported.

But, the intelligence also said that Ukraine’s military operation was “put on hold.”

CNN has reached out to the Ukrainian government for comment.

White House National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby declined to address the reporting directly on Tuesday.

“I think you know there are three countries conducting an investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage — and we called it sabotage at the moment — Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. Those investigations are ongoing and again the last thing that we’re going to want to do from this podium is get ahead of those investigations,” Kirby said.

The news comes less than a year after leaks caused by underwater explosions were discovered in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which funnel gas from Russia into the European Union and run under the Baltic Sea. The pipelines were controversial before the war in Ukraine began, stoking concerns about European dependence on Russian gas.

Neither of the pipelines were actively transporting gas to Europe at the time of the leaks, though they still held gas under pressure.

Sweden was the first to sound the alarm on the leak; Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson later said that it was “likely a deliberate action” but “not an attack against Sweden.”

Other European leaders such as the Danish prime minister and energy minister, and Norway’s minister of petroleum and energy, also concluded the leaks were a result of sabotage.

Ukraine denied any responsibility for the leaks at the time, with the top adviser to Zelensky referring to the idea as an “amusing conspiracy” theory.

“Although I enjoy collecting amusing conspiracy theories about [the Ukrainian] government, I have to say: [Ukraine] has nothing to do with the Baltic Sea mishap and has no information about ‘pro-[Ukraine] sabotage groups,’” Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Ukrainian officials sought to keep Zelensky out of the loop on the Nord Stream planning in order to give him “a plausible way to deny involvement in an audacious attack on civilian infrastructure” that could impact relationships with countries supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

And while the intelligence said that Ukraine’s plan was paused, the Post’s report said that the details emerging from Germany’s investigation of the attack “line up with the earlier plot.”

The intelligence the US received from a European ally last year said six Ukrainian special operations forces service members intended to use fake identities to rent a boat and destroy or damage the pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor by using a “submersible vehicle,” the Post said.

Details that German officials are piecing together say that six individuals who were “skilled divers” used fake passports and embarked from Germany on a sailing yacht, then planted explosives on the pipelines, according to the Post.

The details between the two plans differ in some regards, the Post said, and the CIA “initially questioned the credibility of the information.” Nevertheless, sources previously told CNN that the US had warned several European allies over the summer that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines could be attacked.

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April 12, 2021
Why Republicans can’t get out of their climate bind, even as extreme heat overwhelms the US | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Deadly heatwaves are baking the US. Scientists just reported that July will be the hottest month on record. And now, after years of skepticism and denial in the GOP ranks, a small number of Republicans are urging their party to get proactive on the climate crisis.

But the GOP is stuck in a climate bind – and likely will be for the next four years, in large part because they’re still living in the shadow of former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.

Even as more Republican politicians are joining the consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right on climate and extreme weather. Trump has called the extremely settled science of climate change a “hoax” and more recently suggested that the impacts of it “may affect us in 300 years.”

Scientists this week reported that this summer’s unrelenting heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” were it not for the planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels. They also confirmed that July will go down as the hottest month on record – and almost certainly that the planet’s temperature is hotter now than it has been in around 120,000 years.

Yet for being one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century, climate is rarely mentioned on the 2024 campaign trail.

“As Donald Trump is the near presumptive nominee of our party in 2024, it’s going to be very hard for a party to adopt a climate-sensitive policy,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, told CNN. “But Donald Trump’s not going to be around forever.”

When Republicans do weigh in on climate change – and what we should do about it – they tend to support the idea of capturing planet-warming pollution rather than cutting fossil fuels. But many are reticent to talk about how to solve the problem, and worry Trump is having a chilling effect on policies to combat climate within the party.

“We need to be talking about this,” Rep. John Curtis, a Republican from Utah and chair of the House’s Conservative Climate Caucus, told CNN. “And part of it for Republicans is when you don’t talk about it, you have no ideas at the table; all you’re doing is saying what you don’t like. We need to be saying what we like.”

With a few exceptions, Republicans largely are no longer the party of full-on climate change denial. But even as temperatures rise to deadly highs, the GOP is also not actively addressing it. There is still no “robust discussion about how to solve it” within the party, said former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, who now runs the conservative climate group RepublicEn, save for criticism of Democrats’ clean-energy initiatives.

“The good news is Republicans are stopping arguing with thermometers,” Inglis told CNN. Still, he said, “when the experience is multiplied over and over of multiple days of three-digit temperatures in Arizona and record ocean temperatures, people start to say, ‘this is sort of goofy we’re not doing something about this.’”

Meanwhile, the impacts of a dramatically warming atmosphere are becoming more and more apparent each year. Romney and Curtis, two of the loudest climate voices in the party, both represent Utah – a state that’s no stranger to extreme heat and drought, which scientists say is being fueled by rising global temperatures.

“There are a number of states, like mine, that are concerned about wildfires and water,” Romney said, adding he believes Republican governors of impacted states have been vocal about these issues.

Utah and other Western states are looking for ways to cut water use to save the West’s shrinking two largest reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead. And even closer to home, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has already disappeared by two-thirds, and scientists are sounding alarms about a rapid continued decline that could kill delicate ecosystems and expose one of fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the nation to toxic dust.

“I think the evidence so far is that the West is getting drier and hotter,” Romney told CNN. “That means that we’re going to have more difficulty with our crops, we’re going to have a harder time keeping the rivers full of water. The Great Salt Lake is probably going to continue to shrink. And unfortunately, we’re going to see more catastrophic fires. If the trends continue, we need to act.”

While Republicans blast Democrats’ clean energy policies ahead of the 2024 elections, it’s less clear what the GOP itself would prefer to do about the climate crisis.

As Curtis tells it, there’s a lot that Republicans and Democrats in Congress agree on. They both want to further reform the permitting process for major energy projects, and they largely agree on the need for more renewable and nuclear energy.

As the head of the largest GOP climate caucus on the Hill, Curtis’ Utah home is “full solar,” he told CNN, and is heated using geothermal energy.

While at a recent event at a natural gas drilling site in Ohio, as smoke from Canada’s devastating wildfire season hung thick in the air, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was asked how he would solve the climate crisis. He suggested planting a trillion trees to help offset the pollution created by burning fossil fuels – a bill House Republicans introduced in 2020. The measure has not yet passed the House and has an uncertain future in the Senate.

But the biggest and most enduring difference between the two parties is that Republicans want fossil fuels – which are fueling climate change with their heat-trapping pollution – to be in the energy mix for years to come.

Democrats, meanwhile, have passed legislation to dramatically speed up the clean energy transition and prioritize the development of wind, solar and electrical transmission to get renewables sending electricity into homes faster.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Democrats want to pass more climate legislation if they take back a full majority in Congress. He later told CNN the GOP is “way behind” on climate and there’s been “too little” progress on the party’s stances.

“I think we’d get a lot more done with a Democratic House, a Democratic president and continuing to have a Democratic Senate,” Schumer told CNN. “Unfortunately, if you look at some of the Republican House and Senate Super PACs, huge amounts of money come from gas, oil and coal.”

Even though Curtis and Romney are aligned on the party needing to talk about climate change, they differ on how to fix it. While Curtis primarily supports carbon capture and increased research and development into new technologies, Romney is one of the few Republicans speaking in favor of a carbon tax – taxing companies for their pollution.

“It’s very unlikely that a price on carbon would be acceptable in the House of Representatives,” Romney said. “I think you might find a few Republican senators that would be supportive, but that’s not enough.”

The idea certainly doesn’t have the support of Trump, or other 2024 candidates for president, and experts predict climate policy will get little to no airtime during the upcoming presidential race.

“Regrettably, the issue of climate change is currently being held hostage to the culture wars in America,” Edward Maibach, a professor of climate communication at George Mason University and a co-founder of a nationwide climate polling project conducted with Yale University, told CNN in an email. “Donald Trump’s climate denial stance will have a chilling effect on the climate positions of his rivals on the right — even those who know better.”

Even if climate-conscious Republicans say Trump won’t be in the party forever, Inglis said even a few more years may not be enough time to counteract the rapid changes already happening.

“That’s still a long way away,” Inglis said. “The scientists are saying we can’t wait, get moving, get moving.”

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April 12, 2021
Two very different points of view on nuclear energy in the US | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Two distinct and unrelated stories this week convinced me it was a good moment to look at nuclear power in the US.

Those developments, which might give anyone pause about the future of nuclear power, are counteracted by other headlines.

The opening of a new nuclear plant in Georgia, for example, will bring carbon emission-free energy at exactly the time worldwide temperature records drive home the reality of climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Germany made the decision to decommission all of its nuclear plants after disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. The last nuclear reactor there was taken offline earlier this year, a decision some might have regretted after Germany’s access to Russian natural gas was threatened by the war in Ukraine.

Next door, France is the worldwide nuclear leader. Most of its electricity is generated by nuclear power.

Russia, while it has been ostracized from the world economy in almost every way since its invasion of Ukraine, remains a major player in nuclear power. It enriches and sells uranium through its state-controlled nuclear energy company, Rosatom, which builds and operates plants around the world, according to a March report from CNN’s Clare Sebastian that explains why the West has largely left Russia’s nuclear power industry alone.

But it is China that is moving the quickest toward nuclear power production, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

As of 2022, about 18% of US electricity is generated by nuclear power, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Most large US nuclear reactors are old – averaging 40 years or more.

In addition to the Georgia reactor coming online, a new reactor began operating in Tennessee in 2016. But otherwise, the US nuclear power portfolio is old, and much of it is in need of improvement.

For an idea of the money and corruption that can revolve around energy production, look at the sentencing last week of Ohio’s former House Speaker Larry Householder to 20 years in prison for his involvement in a bribery scheme meant to get the utility company FirstEnergy Corp. a billion-dollar taxpayer bailout for two nuclear plants.

The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden in 2021 included a $6 billion program to provide grants to nuclear reactor owners or operators and stave off closing them.

More than a dozen reactors have closed early in the US over the past decade, according to the Department of Energy. At least one reactor, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, will be kept open after a more than $1 billion grant.

Nuclear power – and how aggressively the US and other countries should be pursuing it – is a topic that splits scientists as well.

I talked to one nuclear expert who said the US should be slow and methodical about nuclear power and another who argued there are multiple, public misperceptions about nuclear power that should be corrected.

The more circumspect voice is Rodney Ewing, a Stanford University professor and expert on nuclear waste who was chairman of a federal review of nuclear waste procedures. I was put in touch with him by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which aims to “reduce man-made threats to our existence.”

Despite his decades spent focused on nuclear issues, he said something I found remarkable:

“I don’t have yet, although I’ve tried for years, a well-formed position for or against nuclear energy,” Ewing said.

“Too often in the enthusiasm for nuclear energy, a carbon-free source of energy – and in the present situation of the issue of climate change, really a very important existential crisis – it’s easy to say, well, we’ll solve the problems later.”

He said the issues with nuclear energy – from the potential for disaster to the issue of how to store nuclear waste – should be compared with the potential for renewable alternatives like solar and wind energy.

The University of Illinois energy professor, David Ruzic – who has a lively YouTube channel, “Illinois EnergyProf,” with multiple videos meant to dispel concerns about nuclear energy – has a much more positive view of nuclear energy’s future.

Illinois, by the way, generates more nuclear power than any other state. Lawmakers there recently voted to lift a moratorium on new reactor construction that was in place until the federal government can develop a technology for disposing of nuclear waste. That new policy must still be signed by the state’s governor.

Ruzic argues nuclear waste takes up such little space it should simply be encased in yards of solid concrete and kept at the site of nuclear reactors. The concrete, he argued, can be repaired every 70 years or so as it degrades.

“Over the 60 years we’ve been doing this commercially, we have learned so much about how to do it extremely safely and very well,” Ruzic said, arguing that the new plant in Georgia would not be affected by an earthquake and tidal wave in the way that Fukushima was, because the new reactor in Georgia is cooled by air in case of an emergency.

He argued that even in Fukushima, it’s important to note that there were no deaths associated with the radiation due to the failure of the plant, although many thousands were evacuated.

Any concern you can find to raise about nuclear power, Ruzic has a ready answer. He said no one should worry about the radioactive water Japan plans to release into the ocean from Fukushima because there is a level of radioactivity in everything already.

“You are adding something trivial and inconsequential, which will be diluted even more,” Ruzic said.

Even the Russia-Ukraine standoff over the Zaporizhzhia plant does not concern Ruzic; the biggest threat he sees, assuming it is not targeted by bunker-busting bombs, is that the plant ceases making electricity – not that it could turn into another Chernobyl.

“It’s really unfortunate that it’s in the middle of a war zone. But it’s also really unfortunate that chemical plants or coal plants or other plants are in the middle of a war zone as well,” he argued.

Both professors brought up the push toward small, modular nuclear technology for which there are numerous companies speculating there will be a major market. That market could grow exponentially if the government decides to put a tax on carbon emissions to account for the harm they cause.

Ewing argued there is not a clear US national energy strategy, and that means numerous state and federal agencies and private companies are searching, often at odds with each other, for something new. The expense and difficulty of developing nuclear technology will be a roadblock. The new Georgia plant took more than a decade to build and came in over budget.

Ruzic said that after the initial capital expenditure, the relative low cost of fuel for nuclear plants makes them a good, long-term investment.

When I came back to Ewing about his comment that he has no clear preference for or against nuclear energy, he said the broad question overlooks too much.

“The nuclear landscape is, from a technical and social point of view, complicated enough that broad general positions really don’t serve us very well,” he said.

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April 12, 2021