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Tag: fossil fuel

  • Promises of lower energy bills win big on election day

    Key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia made it clear that energy affordability was on the ballot this election day as Democrats who campaigned on the issue swept the field.

    Candidates in the three states campaigned on tackling rising energy costs through renewables, such as wind and solar, or by supporting the Trump administration in promoting fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal.

    Trump has said that ramping up the production of fossil fuels will “unleash American energy” and save taxpayers money. But residential electric bills have increased about 10% nationwide this year — from 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour in January to 17.6 cents at the end of August, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

    At the same time, wind and solar remain the least expensive form of new-build electricity generation, according to the financial advisory firm Lazard.

    The race for New Jersey governor saw Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill face off against Republican Jack Ciattarelli after state residents saw a roughly 20% price spike in electricity rates this year driven by reduced supply and growing demand from data centers and a slow rollout of renewables, among other challenges.

    Sherrill campaigned heavily on the issue, vowing to declare a state of emergency on utility costs on her first day in office and institute a utility rate freeze.

    “Prices are spiking because of a huge power shortage — I’ll transform New Jersey’s energy picture to build new, cheaper, and cleaner energy generation, bring down families’ bills, and put the Garden State on track to hit our emissions and clean air goals,” Sherrill wrote in her campaign materials.

    Ciattarelli, meanwhile, vowed to implement a state energy master plan fueled by natural gas, nuclear and solar power but not offshore wind, which he promised to ban. “I will cap property taxes for families and freeze them for seniors, while killing offshore wind farms and expanding safe and clean natural gas and nuclear to lower electricity rates, which are currently out of control,” he told the NJ Spotlight News.

    Ciattarelli also called for pulling the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based program to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in Mid-Atlantic states that is similar to California’s cap-and-trade program.

    Sherrill won the governor’s race with more than 56% of the vote.

    Energy prices are spiking in the U.S., in part, because the Trump administration has been cutting funding for wind, solar and battery energy storage, according to Nick Abraham, senior state communications director with the nonprofit League of Conservation Voters. The administration also has moved to block some projects that were almost completed.

    “These races were about energy costs and affordability, and there were two clear cases made by candidates on both sides,” Abraham said. “One side wanted to stick with the Trump agenda — trying to ban clean energy and focusing on fossil fuels — and one side was trying to lower costs and implement clean energy strategies. And the results speak for themselves.”

    According to Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar ranges from $38 to $78 per megawatt hour and offshore wind from $37 to $86 per megawatt hour.

    That’s compared with $71 to $173 per megawatt hour for coal and $149 to $251 per megawatt hour for gas peaking plants, among fossil fuels.

    The issue was also top-of-mind with voters in Virginia, who took to the polls in a governor’s race between Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. The state is now home to more than a third of all data centers worldwide.

    Spanberger focused heavily on affordability in housing, healthcare and energy during her campaign and said she would expand and incentivize the development of solar energy projects, along with technologies such as fusion, geothermal and hydrogen.

    “Specific to energy, we have to have more generation here on the ground in Virginia,” Spanberger said in an interview with CBS in Richmond, adding that the state is already leading the way with the largest offshore wind farm in the country. The 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is slated to produce enough clean energy to power up to 660,000 homes when completed in 2026.

    Earle-Sears focused on an “all of the above” approach to energy generation including oil, natural gas and renewables, but also worked to remove the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which she described as an “energy tax” driving higher costs. She also promised to repeal the Virginia Clean Economy Act, a 2020 law that requires the state’s utilities to produce 100% renewable electricity by 2050.

    Spanberger won the governor’s race with more than 57% of the vote.

    Meanwhile, voters in Georgia also turned out in a race for two seats on their five-member Public Service Commission, which oversees the state’s utilities. The commission approved six utility bill rate hikes over the last two years.

    Democratic challengers Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson won out over Republicans in Tuesday’s race with the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years, according to the Associated Press.

    Both candidates made rising costs key in their campaigns, with Hubbard vowing to “bring clean, reliable and affordable energy to Georgia” and Johnson pushing for “bold investments in solar and wind.”

    Their opponents, Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, backed a rate freeze but also resorted to Trump-style attacks, with Echols stating at a campaign event that Johnson, a Black woman, wanted to “bring DEI and wokeness” to the Public Service Commission.

    Policy experts said the races were not only a bellwether for the 2026 midterms, but a strong signal that Americans support the clean energy transition.

    “Voters chose leaders who see clean energy as the path to long-term affordability and reliability,” said Frederick Bell, associate director for state climate policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank.

    Hayley Smith

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  • How Trump pressures the world into burning more oil and gas

    The world was on the brink of a climate milestone: adopting a global carbon tax for the shipping industry. Countries had spent years crafting the plan, hoping to throttle planet-warming pollution from cargo vessels. They had every reason to think the measure would pass when the International Maritime Organization met in mid-October.

    Enter Donald Trump. After returning to the White House for a second term, the president and his top officials undertook a monthslong campaign to defeat the initiative. The U.S. threatened tariffs, levies and visa restrictions to get its way. A battery of American diplomats and Cabinet secretaries met with various nations to twist arms, according to a senior U.S. State Department official, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Nations were also warned of other potential consequences if they backed the tax on shipping emissions, including imposing sanctions on individuals and blocking ships from U.S. ports.

    Under that Trump-led pressure — or intimidation, as some describe it — some countries started to waver. Ultimately, a bloc including the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Iran voted to adjourn the meeting for a year, killing any chance of the charge being adopted anytime soon.

    The U.S. “bullied otherwise supportive or neutral countries into turning against” the net-zero plan for shipping, says Faïg Abbasov, a director at the European advocacy group Transport & Environment. With its intense lobbying at the International Maritime Organization, the Trump administration was “waging war against multilateralism, UN diplomacy and climate diplomacy.”

    At first glance, it might look like the U.S. has exited the climate fight. The president is once again pulling the country out of the Paris Agreement, and he may not send an official U.S. delegation to next month’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil. But don’t be confused: America is still in the arena; it’s just fighting for the other side.

    Since his return to Washington, Trump has used trade talks, tariff threats and verbal dressing-downs to encourage countries to jettison their renewable energy commitments (and buy more U.S. oil and liquefied natural gas in the process). Just 10 months into his second term, the campaign is showing surprising success as key figures and countries increasingly buckle under the determined pressure.

    Trump was elected to implement a “common sense energy agenda,” says White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers. He “will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”

    Oil and gas supporters champion the president’s ambition. They say he’s helped reset the global conversation around climate change and given a welcome political opening to banks, corporations and other governments that wanted to back away from some sustainability targets in the face of growing electricity demand. “President Trump is sort of providing the banks, the European Union and others cover for tempering their climate ambitions,” says Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, an advocacy group. “He gives these countries the ability to say, ‘Hey, I’m just trying to go along with the United States here. That’s why I’m buying all this LNG.’”

    But in the eyes of environmental advocates and leaders who depend on multilateralism as a means for global climate action, Trump is unfairly asserting his will on a world that’s running out of time to rein in emissions and avert the worst consequences of global warming. “They’re clearly casting a much wider net to the climate destruction than they did the first time,” says Jake Schmidt, a senior strategic director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They have more people engaged in it, and they obviously had more time to plan for it.”

    The strong-arming is happening on multiple fronts. Among the biggest is trade, where Trump has already compelled Japan, South Korea and the EU to pledge to spend on American energy and energy infrastructure. Japan, for instance, agreed to invest $550 billion on U.S. projects, and talks are underway to steer some of that funding to a $44 billion Alaska gas pipeline and export site. South Korea has pledged roughly $100 billion in U.S. energy purchases.

    The EU, meanwhile, has vowed to spend some $750 billion buying American energy, including LNG, to secure lower tariffs on its exports to the U.S. Analysts have questioned whether those sales will fully materialize, since they’d require Europe to more than triple its annual energy imports from the U.S. But the public commitment by itself was a stunning move for a bloc that’s led the world in pushing policies to combat climate change — including by setting binding targets for slashing planet-warming pollution, establishing a “green deal” plan to shed fossil fuels and slapping a tariff on carbon-intensive imports.

    Trump administration officials have seized on the U.S.-EU trade deal to urge other changes. For instance, Energy Secretary Chris Wright is pressuring the bloc to relax curbs on the methane footprint of imported gas. The EU is already easing corporate sustainability requirements so fewer companies are compelled to limit their environmental harms, a retrenchment that came after pressure from Germany and other European stakeholders as well as the White House.

    Meanwhile the administration has been goading the International Energy Agency to shuffle its leadership and urged the agency to reinstate forecasts that show a rosier outlook for fossil fuel demand. It has pressed multilateral development banks to prioritize fossil fuels over climate adaptation and clean energy projects when their financing of those green initiatives has become critical given widespread foreign aid cuts.

    And Trump himself has berated countries that aren’t falling in line. In a September speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he chided nations for setting policies around what he called the “hoax” and “con job” of climate change, warning that they can’t be “great again” without “traditional energy sources.” He’s also told UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to reject wind turbines and embrace the North Sea’s oil riches.

    It’s a marked acceleration from term-one Trump. During his first four years in the White House, Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda amounted to rally cries of “drill, baby, drill” and slow steps to encourage more domestic oil and gas production. This time around, the president’s approach has global reach — and far fewer limits. And when it comes to international agreements relating to energy and climate, “the U.S. has an interest in divide and rule, and thus breaking the potential for cooperation,” says Abby Innes, an associate professor in political economy at the London School of Economics.

    Whether or not U.S. officials attend COP30 in November, the U.S. president’s influence will loom large. “Countries like Saudi Arabia feel emboldened by Trump to promote fossil fuels,” says Linda Kalcher, founder of the Strategic Perspectives think tank and a veteran of the annual UN climate summits. One European diplomat said the main goal now at COP30 is just to avoid being bullied.

    To be sure, other countries haven’t followed the U.S. exodus from the Paris Agreement, and the deployment of clean energy is still soaring globally. Even tax incentive phaseouts and project cancellations in the U.S. are only slowing, not stopping, the country’s adoption of wind and solar power. And while multinational companies may be dialing down their green rhetoric, analysts say many are still quietly cleaning up their supply chains and operations to keep selling in California, Europe and other places demanding more sustainability.

    And in a perverse twist for a U.S. president who’s decried the world’s reliance on China, other nations are increasingly linking arms with Beijing as they bid for zero-emission energy tech. “When it comes to dealing with China, whether it’s countries or companies, politicians and executives tell me: ‘Better the devil that you know,’” says Ioannis Ioannou, an associate professor at the London Business School whose research focuses on sustainability and corporate social responsibility. “It offers more stability than the Trump administration.”

    Dlouhy and Rathi write for Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s Jack Wittels and John Ainger contributed to this report.

    Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Akshat Rathi

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  • Humanity is on path toward ‘climate chaos,’ scientists warn

    Industries and individuals around the world burned record amounts of oil, gas and coal last year, releasing more greenhouse gases than ever before, a group of leading scientists said in a new report, warning that humanity is hurtling toward “climate chaos.”

    The surge in global use of fossil fuels in 2024 contributed to extreme weather and devastating disasters including heat waves, storms, floods and wildfires.

    “The planet’s vital signs are flashing red,” the scientists wrote in their annual report on the state of the climate. “The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing.”

    Some of the most alarming of Earth’s “vital signs,” the researchers said, include record heat in the oceans ravaging coral reefs, rapidly shrinking ice sheets and increasing losses of forests burned in fires around the world. They said the extreme intensity of Hurricane Melissa this week is another sign of how the altered climate is threatening lives and communities on an unprecedented scale.

    “The climate crisis has reached a really dangerous stage,” said William Ripple, the report’s co-lead author and a professor at Oregon State University. “It is vital that we limit future warming as rapidly as possible.”

    There is still time to limit the damage, Ripple said. It means switching to cleanly made electricity, clean transportation, fewer beef and dairy cows and other sources of harmful gases. These transitions are happening in some places, though not nearly fast enough.

    For example, fossil fuel use actually fell in China in the first half of this year, a remarkable change for a country that remains the world’s biggest climate polluter. Renewable energy is being built out at a furious pace there, dwarfing installation in rest of the world. And in California, clean energy provided two-thirds of electricity in 2023.

    Yet total use of fossil fuels rose 1.5% in 2024, the researchers said, citing data from the Energy Institute. Energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-heating gases also reached an all-time high — exactly the opposite of what needs to be happening to address climate change.

    The report notes that hotter temperatures are contributing to growing electricity demand.

    “Avoiding every fraction of a degree of warming is critically important,” the scientists wrote. “We are entering a period where only bold, coordinated action can prevent catastrophic outcomes.”

    The report, published Wednesday in the journal BioScience, is the sixth annual assessment that Ripple and his colleagues have compiled since they wrote a 2020 paper declaring a climate emergency — a statement that more than 15,800 scientists have signed in support.

    The scientists said the current pace of warming greatly increases the risks of crossing dangerous climate tipping points, including vicious cycles such as the collapse of ice sheets, thawing of carbon-rich permafrost and widespread dieback of forests.

    Ripple and his colleagues stressed that adopting solutions now to reduce emissions can swiftly bring benefits and that these solutions will be far less expensive than dealing with the consequences of uncontrolled climate change.

    Efforts by President Trump and his administration to boost production of oil, gas and coal seriously threaten to slow the shift toward clean energy, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

    He and co-author Peter Hotez argue in the recent book “Science Under Siege” that other nations must take on greater leadership now that the U.S. and other oil-promoting governments are working to block action on climate change.

    Other scientists who helped write the report said the Trump administration is turning a blind eye to threats including sea-level rise, worsening droughts and wildfires, and diminished agricultural output.

    “It’s a scandal that the U.S. is pulling back from any efforts to address environmental challenges,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow of the Pacific Institute, a think tank in Oakland. “The rest of the world should ignore efforts by the U.S. to delay progress on these problems … and I’m hopeful that other countries will continue to step up.”

    The upcoming United Nations climate conference in Brazil in November could be a turning point if countries commit to bold and transformative changes, Ripple said.

    Solutions must involve not only phasing out fossil fuels, the scientists said, but also addressing the fact that people are using up resources faster than nature can replenish them. Researchers, they noted, have estimated that two-thirds of the warming since 1990 is attributable to the wealthiest 10% of the world’s people because of “high-consumption lifestyles, high per capita fossil fuel use, and investments.”

    The scientists called for changes including “reducing overconsumption” among the wealthy, protecting and restoring ecosystems, and shifting away from meat-heavy diets to more plant-based foods.

    “It’s not just about cutting emissions. Dealing with climate change requires more,” Ripple said. “It calls for deep, systemic change in how societies value nature, design economies, consume resources and define progress.”

    Ian James

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